Cyclamen, clementines & cake

This Christmas I wanted something different to the usual vase of flowers for my table. I've always thought that piles of clementines with their leaves looked very Christmassy but the problem is that we don't actually like them that much.

Then Gillian posted about the orange cake her husband had made and I realised I could still have my clementines and eat them!

I already had the gold platter and the fairy lights from the Woodland Vase. The cyclamen was from Asda and came with the gold star pot. Grapes were added to fill out the display but also to tempt Chickpea to eat fruit instead of all the chocolate she was likely to receive! I added a few baubles for some extra colour.

I was really pleased with the way it turned out and it looked lovely on my table and lit up at night, though I think I ended up eating more of the grapes than Chickpea!

And so to the cake. Originally I planned to make Nigella's delicious Clementine Cake from her book How to Eat, which I've made a couple of times. But, while I was browsing through my file of recipes looking for a special dessert for New Year's Day, I came across a Fruity Ricotta Cake from the Morrisons magazine which used slices of the clementines to decorate the top and sides. It looked so pretty I couldn't resist.

I used a reusable cake tin liner for the first time and was very impressed. The cake came out of the tin beautifully - just slid out without sticking at all. In fact the liner stayed 'stuck' to the tin. I'll definitely be using it again.

This was the finished cake. I thought it would be more like a cheesecake but it was actually more like the clementine cake with a moist almondy taste and texture.

(Hmm, I'm now wishing I'd taken more time to get a better photo and that doily was definitely a mistake. But the hungry hoards were waiting!)

Whilst on the subject of cakes, when I went back to work on Thursday, I was finally able to open my Secret Santa present after missing out before Christmas with my back. Well, it was worth the wait - look what Santa brought me! He clearly knows me very well :-)

We've just finished taking down all the decorations and clearing Christmas away for another year. There's a couple more mentions of it to come on here though as I've got a recipe to share with you and and another gift I made for friends. Back in a day or two.