Anna Jones' Chocolate Orange Freezer Cake recipe

by Anna Jones

Anna Jones shares her delicious chocolate and blood orange freezer cake recipe. Perfect for warmer weather – or indeed any time of year – Anna Jones tells us why she chooses Fairtrade ingredients.

To me, food is about much more than flavour. It’s about the people and the farmers behind it. When I buy Fairtrade, I buy it knowing that everyone who has helped to get it to my plate has been taken care of.

This is a no-cook cake, raw in fact if you are into that kind of thing; I use the freezer to set the cake instead of the oven. These cakes are sometimes called ice-box cakes, which I think sounds quite magical. It’s the kind of dessert I like to eat in January.

I use a raw cashew butter here, which I buy from the supermarket, though if I have time I make it at home, as the flavour is gentler than the toasted nut butters you can buy and it has notes of white chocolate. Any more subtly flavoured nut butter would work here.

Ingredients

Serves 6 – 8

For the crust

25g Fairtrade cashew nuts
coconut oil, for greasing
120g pitted Fairtrade Medjool dates
1 teaspoon Fairtrade vanilla extract
1 tablespoon raw cacao or Fairtrade cocoa powder
a generous pinch of flaky sea salt
120g nut butter (I use a raw cashew butter, see note)
125g whole buckwheat

For the filling

70g Fairtrade cashew nuts
50g Fairtrade pitted Medjool dates
a good pinch of salt
450g ripe peeled Fairtrade bananas
the seeds from 1 Fairtrade vanilla pod or 1 teaspoon vanilla paste
70g coconut oil, melted
the zest and juice of 1 unwaxed blood orange
3 passion fruits, cut in half

To finish

3 blood oranges
40g Fairtrade dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids)

Method

First, soak both the cashews for the filling and for the crust in separate bowls of cold water for 3-4 hours if you have time, if not then soak them in warm water for 30 minutes. Grease the bottom of a 22cm loose-bottomed tart tin with coconut oil and put to one side.

Next make the crust. In a food processor, blitz the 25g of soaked, drained cashews and the dates until they have broken down into tiny pieces and start to come together in a ball. Add the vanilla, cacao, salt and nut butter and blitz until combined. Then add the buckwheat and blitz until the buckwheat has broken down a bit and the crust dough comes together in your fingers when pinched. Put the crust mixture into the middle of the greased tin and use your fingers to push it out to the edges and up the sides of the tin, then put it into the freezer to set for at least 3 hours.

Next make the filling. Put the soaked, drained cashews into a jug blender with the dates, salt, bananas and vanilla and blitz until completely smooth. Pour in the melted coconut oil, then add the orange zest and blitz again. Pour two-thirds into the chilled crust.

Scrape the seeds from the passion fruits into a sieve resting over a bowl. Use the back of a spoon to push the juice through, add this to the remaining banana mixture in the blender and add the juice of the blood orange, then pour this layer over the banana one. Smooth everything over with a spatula and put the crust back in the freezer for 30 minutes to firm up, though it can happily sit there for much longer.

To finish, take the tart out of the freezer about an hour before you want to eat. Cut the peel off the blood oranges and slice the flesh into thin rounds. Break the chocolate into shards.

Once the cake is thawed enough that the filling is beginning to soften, arrange the blood oranges and chocolate on top prettily and pat yourself on the back. Any leftovers can be stored in the freezer for up to 2 weeks.

From A Modern Cook’s Year by Anna Jones. Anna’s latest book, ONE, was published on 4 March 2021 by 4^th Estate.