We Should Cocoa: Apricot, Chocolate & Ginger Cake

I had all sorts of ideas for this month's We Should Cocoa, in which apricots are the special guest ingredient. We can buy incredible Otago dried apricots here, which are bright orange, intensely tangy and about a million times tastier than the pallid Turkish imports. They're also about a million times more expensive - go figure how they manage that. Anyway, I planned to dip these local nuggets into locally made dark chocolate, but the Small Girl and I accidentally ate most of them for morning tea. Then I remembered the tins of apricots lurking in the pantry and had the sort of recipe epiphany that only food nerds understand. This dark, moist cake was the result.

Apricot, Chocolate & Ginger Cake
This is a reimagining of Nigella's Clementine Cake, which I've made so often I could probably make it in my sleep. I've replaced the cooked, pureed clementines with apricots and added a touch of ginger.

400g drained tinned apricots (annoyingly, about 1 1/2 400g tins)
6 eggs
50g cocoa
200g ground almonds
250g caster sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp ground ginger

Preheat the oven to 180C and grease and line a 23cm springform cake tin. Put the drained apricots in a food processor and blitz to a fine puree. Add all the other ingredients and whiz again until well mixed. Pour into the prepared tin and bake for 35-45 minutes - it will be damp and sticky but a toothpick plunged in should come out cleanly. Let cool for 10 minutes in the tin, then turn out to cool on a rack.

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