Can I Use Date Paste In The Flourless Chocolate Orange Cake?

Our answer

Nigella's Flourless Chocolate Orange Cake (from FEAST) is a cocoa-tinged version of her Clementine Cake. Whole oranges are cooked until soft and then blended with eggs, sugar, ground almonds (almond meal/flour) and cocoa. The resulting cake is moist and tender, as well as being gluten free.

Unfortunately, we cannot recommend or advise on using date past as an alternaive to caster sugar. We understand that date paste may work in some recipes that use soft brown sugar, but here the recipe uses caster (superfine) sugar as it helps with the structure of the cake, particularly as there is no gluten. The eggs also provide leavening, so reducing the eggs in the recipe could give a flatter, denser cake and to reduce other liquids in the recipe would mean reducing the amount of oranges, which is also quite difficult. If you are looking for a recipe that uses dates as a sweetener, then we would suggest trying Nigella's Date And Marmalade Christmas Cake, which also has an orange element as it includes marmalade.