mandarin hazelnut syrup cake

mandarin hazelnut syrup cake

22 Jun 2026

It's citrus season here and my fruit bowl is loaded with oranges, mandarins and limes. It seemed a shame not to take advantage of this bounty so I looked online for some inspiration which is where I found this mandarin flavoured hazelnut cake.

I looked through the fridge, my pantry and the fruit bowl and I had everything I needed to make the cake. It's a simple melt and mix cake and I'm sure it could be made using olive oil instead of melted butter. I've made many similar cakes before so I changed the method a little to reflect how I usually make a melt and mix cake.

Here's the recipe for you which makes a 17-cm cake, adapted from a Matt Moran recipe. For all my recipes I use a 250ml cup and a 20ml tablespoon, unsalted butter and 60g eggs. My oven is a conventional gas oven so if your oven is fan forced, you may need to reduce the oven temperature by 20°C.

Mandarin and hazelnut syrup cake 
Ingredients
250g mandarins, about 2 small mandarins
150g caster sugar
125g unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
65g eggs
125g plain flour
60g hazelnut meal (I used a combination of hazelnut and almond meal)

1 tsp baking powder
large pinch seasalt flakes
90g thick natural yoghurt, plus extra to serve

Mandarin syrup
180g caster sugar
Peel of 1 mandarin
Scraped seeds of ½ vanilla bean
180mls water

35mls lemon juice

To serve
2 - 3 mandarins, peeled and thickly sliced into rounds, reserve the peel of 1 mandarin for the syrup

plain yoghurt

Method
Preheat oven to 180°C, conventional or 160°C, fan forced. Grease, flour and line the base of a 17cm cake tin with a round of baking paper.

Peel 1 mandarin, then remove and discard any fine fibres from the skins. Blitz the skin and sugar in a small food processor until fine and smooth, transfer to a bowl and set aside.

Blitz the flesh of the mandarins you’ve peeled in the food processor until pureed, discard any seeds (I had 150mls of mandarin puree). Add the butter to the sugar mix, followed by the egg mixture and whisk to combine. 

Whisk the flour, hazelnut meal, baking powder and a pinch of salt together in a bowl. Add to the mandarin mixture alternating with the mandarin puree then whisk in yoghurt and mix until smooth. Spoon into prepared cake tin and bake on the centre rack of the preheated 180°C conventional oven for 55 minutes – 1 hour until risen, golden brown and a skewer inserted withdraws clean. Cool in tin for 10 minutes then transfer the tin to a wire rack. Loosen the cake with an off set spatula and invert onto the cooling rack. Remove the baking paper from the base of the cake, then invert and return to the tin.

Meanwhile, to make the mandarin syrup, blitz the sugar with the mandarin peel until fine, then combine in a wide saucepan with vanilla and the water. Stir over medium-high heat until sugar dissolves, bring to the boil, reduce heat to medium, simmer for 5-6 minutes until lightly syrupy, skimming off any scum that comes to the surface. Remove from the heat, add lemon juice, stand to cool slightly. 

Peel the remaining mandarins, and take off any fibres, then thickly slice and combine in a container with half the syrup. Refrigerate to chill.

Pierce several holes in the cake then pour the rest of the warm syrup over the warm cake. Let the syrup soak in (this could take more than an hour) and cool to room temperature before serving.

Serve the cake with the mandarin slices, the syrup and extra yoghurt.

The cake was as delicious as you'd expect a nut cake doused with mandarin syrup topped with yoghurt would be. Could you make this using oranges? Absolutely.

See you all again next week with some more baking from my kitchen.

Bye for now,

Jillian

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a passionfruit tart

a passionfruit tart

31 Oct 2011

I've always loved the taste of passionfruit. Passionfruit are quite expensive at the moment but when they're on special at the fruit market I buy up big and freeze the pulp. I've been making passionfruit tarts for many years and I've always used the same recipe. A year or two ago the recipe suddenly stopped working for me. The pastry shell would split and half the filling would leak out creating a big mess or else the filling would turn out really frothy.



I'm kind of known for my paper thin pastry but after way too many disasters, I decided to adapt the recipe slightly and made my pastry a teensy bit thicker than usual. This Matt Moran recipe from Gourmet Traveller is very close to the one I used. In addition to the passionfruit juice, I used some blood orange juice to maintain the vibrant colour of the filling.



Eureka! The tart came out perfectly. I took the tart into work and when it was discovered by the throng, I could hear squeals coming from the office. They do like this tart.



I took my slice home and decided to pretty it up a bit with some passionfruit syrup and slices of just ripe mango. I probably like mango even more than I like passionfruit. Yum!



I've gone a bit pastry crazy the past few weeks. I've got one tart post in the wings and another one or two in the pipeline, so stay tuned.

I hope you all had lovely weekends. See you all again on Wednesday,

Jillian

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