Tarta de Santiago - St James Cake

This tart is from the North West of Spain (Galicia), it is made in honor of their patron St James whose remains are buried in Santiago de Compostela and has a really important pilgrim route.
I ate this cake lots of times but never cook it before and  as I could not find any recipe in my Spanish cooking books I made a research on line and found one that I really like, I was quite surprised to know that this cake has no flour, milk or butter, so if you use vegetable margarine to grease the tin people with dairy intolerance can eat it.

You will need:

250g of ground almonds
250g of white sugar
4 eggs
1  grated lemon grind
1tsp of ground cinnamon
Dusting sugar for decoration
23cm tin

The recipe I found says just to put the rind of half lemon, I put the whole grated lemon rind just because I do really like lemon, you can choose.

We pre-heat the oven at 200C and grease the tin.

Put the ground almond, the  grated lemon grind and the cinnamon together in a bowl and stir until combine.

In another bowl put the sugar and the eggs and cream them using a manual whisker, do not use an electric whisker because we do not want to add too much air to the mix.

Once we have the eggs creamed we start adding the almond mix slowly and combine it with a silicon spatula until it is homogeneous.

Now we pour the mix into the tin and put it in the oven, just after we do this, we change the oven temperature to 180C and bake it for about 30 minutes, check that it is cook properly before you take it out.

We put it to cool down on a rack and wait a few minutes before we remove the cake from the tin. Once it is cold we decorate with dusting sugar, the St James cake has a cross on top of the cake, I looked for it on line, printed it, cut it and used it to decorate my cake, if you do not want to do it, just sprinkle the dusting sugar on top of the cake.

And now just enjoy :)

 Photos by Jorge Deepsea