In ten days time we start to harvest our grapes ,we hope we will be helped by many of our friends  and family who will also bring their children, so I thought I'd do a little  practice and make this chocolate cake.
I need practice because ... if you look on the left part of the website, under categories, you will see that out of  a total of 197 recipes, only 9 are cakes .... unfortunately, I’m not very good at making them.

But anyway, to avoid a disaster on the day of the harvest I thought now  is a good time to do the test  of this almond and hazelnut gluten free chocolate cake because,  Nicks mum Jackie and her friend Ida are here for a late relaxing  summer holiday (or so they thought) . BUT I thought  while they are sitting in the shade on the porch sipping a large Gin and tonic  it would be very helpful if they shelled a BIG bag of nuts picked from our almond and hazelnut trees (the main ingredients  of this cake) also I just happened to have 2 pairs of nut crackers....unfortunately Ida  managed to pinch her skin a few times but  she was very brave and only moaned a little  .Although chocolate cake may not seem suitable when it could be  35 degrees outside it will give our helpers energy and they will need it.....there are 4 tons of grapes to pick!
The hard work didn’t finish there because I kept reading the weighing scales wrong saying we need more and more ,finally after a couple of hours I got it right and we had the 400 grams needed and just had to remove the skins from the almonds which also was not an easy job to do.
Maybe I should have chosen a Ciambellone ( sponge cake) , I think even a wedding cake would have been easier but of course the real answer is to buy the prepared nuts from the supermarket.......but still we did it.
My worse critic Nick , and Jackie and Ida did the tasting and all agreed it was good but they would prefer it served with ice-cream , but I’m not sure if this was because the texture was more like biscuit or was it because the English I know seem to prefer cream or ice-cream with their cake .
Each to their own is I believe the answer to that.
for the recipe please go to my blog www.sagraincasa.com    grazie

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by BritFinn

They look so beautiful