It’s national macadamia-nut day today!

A tropical tea cake for your sweetie

Many months back I posted about how our Miss Macadamia, with her low omega-6 fatty acids,  offers a treasure chest of healthy, stable fats for your dining pleasure.

Today, in honor of Macadamia’s special day, I’m reposting a delicious recipe for you to try out, featuring macadamia nuts and their oil. It’s called a tea cake in the British sense of the word. It’s more like the scones typically served as part of an English tea than it is a cake in the American sense. But it’s tasty on its own or, if you can afford the calories, you can dress up your own slice with a heaping spoonful of clotted cream and/or low-sugar jam. I used a no-fat yogurt that I flavored myself with lemon and sweetened with stevia.

This cake is full of good nutrition and comes in at just under 200 calories a serving, all this with less than 5 grams sugar if you use stevia. If you opt for the full half cup sugar instead of stevia, you add 10 more grams of sugar to each serving and 40 more calories.

Regardless of how you sweeten it, this cake serves up an excellent dose of fiber and protein, lots of B vitamins and healthy minerals, and tons of the rarer omega-9s plus some omega-3 fats. Bonus: it looks pretty and tastes even better. If you have a heart-shaped pan like I do, cook this one up for your heart’s desire!

Apple yogurt tea cake with macadamia nut oil
adapted from Le Pirate

• 1 cup low-fat Greek yogurt
• 2 cups (240 grams) whole-wheat pastry flour*
• 1/3  cup macadamia nut oil (store nuts and their oils in the fridge for longer shelf life)
• 1/2 cup sugar or the equivalent of stevia**
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
• 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract or the seeds of a vanilla bean
• pinch of salt
• 2 eggs

To decorate

• 2 small red apples, finely sliced***
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 5 or 6 macadamia nuts, crushed, to garnish

1. Preheat oven to 350F (180C).
2. In a bowl, combine yogurt, oil, sweetener, vanilla and eggs. Whisk until well combined.
3. In another bowl combine flour, salt, baking powder and bicarb.
4. Add flour mixture to yogurt mixture. Stir until combined, but don’t stir it too much. Just enough.
5. Then pour it into a round cake tin lined with baking paper, around 24cm in diameter.
6. Arrange the apple slices in two circles on the surface of the batter. Brush with milk and sprinkle over cinnamon, the extra sugar, and the grated macadamia nuts.
7. Bake for around thirty to forty minutes or until a skewer inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.

Le Pirate says, “Serve with a pot of tea and inside jokes.”

Notes:

*      I didn’t have enough whole-wheat flour so I used about 1/3 cup quinoa flakes to make up the full 2 cups the recipe calls for. I get the flakes in my local health food store and always have them on hand. They add protein with no discernible taste.

**    For a sweetener, I used 1/4 cup of a product called “spoonable stevia sugar.” The result? Delicious! Of course, this product is a processed food and contains a filler. Some people avoid it for this reason. I like it better than the pure stevia, though, because with the pure powder it’s so hard for me control the tiny amounts called for. The science to date has cleared the filler as safe.

***  I was plum out of apples, so I used two mangoes sliced thin instead. I liked the moistness the fruit imparted, but some people don’t like the fruity texture. If you try mango instead of apple, let me know how you liked it 🙂.

Macadamia – a pearl of a nut

Related

Miss Macadamia takes the crown – This third post in my nutty soliloquy on fats and oils stars Macadamia, the darling of Hawaii. She wins the healthy nut contest hands down, in spite of the large amount of fat on her frame,  Find out why Macadamia’s polyunsaturated fat profile is such a healthy option.