The Most Beautiful Boring Cake!

Not a very auspicious start to a blog about cakes is it? That was the reaction to my Italian Hazelnut cake, but let me explain. Friends of mine have recently bought a new house (well new to them, not new in the just built way of being new, eighteenth century more like it) and we went to see it for the first time a couple of weeks ago. My, what a lovely house it it too, a bit of work to do but it will be beautiful. So I needed to bring cake, well it would have been rude not to wouldn't it? I have had my eyes on an Italian Hazelnut cake from Rachel Allen's Bake. It's flour less so I thought it would come in handy for friends who don't do flour.
You take 200g of hazelnuts and grind them with cinnamon. Meanwhile whisk 5 egg yolks with 175g of caster sugar until "moussey" and add the hazelnuts and 1 tsp of vanilla extract. Then whisk the eggs whites and a pinch of salt until they form stiff peaks and gently fold into the hazelnut mixture. I did this in three stages making sure that they were well mixed before adding the next load but you also have to be very gentle so as not to deflate the whites. A tricky business. Then pour into a prepared (greased and lined) springform tin and bake in the oven (170 degrees) for 55-70 minutes. Once ready let it cool in the tin for 15 minutes and then ease out and let it cool. I also sprinkled some icing sugar on top, just 'cos I like how it looks (Rachel doesn't call for it).
So all ready, stored in the cake tin safely for the journey and off we went. After some yum scrum Mexican food we cracked open the cake. Many "mmms" and "oohs" and then one of my friends piped up with the phrase above, "Don't take this the wrong way but that is the most beautiful boring cake I've tasted"!! Once she said it I knew exactly what she meant (although I made her explain!), it isn't all bells and whistles, gooey, chocolaty, creamy, stodgy. It's a really clean satisfying hazelnut taste (when it came out of the oven it smelled like hazelnut gelato, THE best gelato flavour). So we tucked into our second slice just to make sure she had got it right!