Pea Cake With Lime Icing for Festive Holiday Baking

When we hear Carrot Cake, we’re all ears! So when we saw ‘the new carrot cake’ on the cover of TASTE’s 15th birthday edition, we paged over immediately to find out what this lime green cake was about. It appeared to be a Pea Cake with Lime Icing! As the batter contains pureed peas instead of grated carrots, a high performance blender is required to blend a smooth paste. To make it easier, we tried making this cake recipe with the OmniBlend blender, using the blender as the only kitchen appliance to prepare the wet mix.

The recipe was an instant winner, and it was fascinating to hear the guesses of what made this cake green without revealing the ingredients immediately: “Mmm… it’s got a sweet freshness… pear?”, and “So what makes it green, matcha?” One taster who had just shared not even liking peas at all, and hadn’t been eating them since childhood, loved it. You can imagine the look on her face when she heard it were the peas that gave it the green colour. :-) It’s the fresh lemon juice in the batter, and the lime in the icing that creates the perfect balance of sweet with a hint of citrus, and makes this cake so good.

In the original recipe there’s no bicarbonate of soda used, which creates a denser and moist texture. As carrot cake recipes often work best using bicarbonate of soda, we tried it with this recipe too, and it resulted in more of a cake crumb texture, which we preferred. We’ve not made further changes to the ingredients, and the directions below are based on using the OmniBlend blender at the most convenient way to whip up this cake.

Ingredients:

• 4 C Frozen Peas
• 400 grams Unsalted Butter (room temperature)
• 300 grams Castor Sugar
• 6 Free-range Eggs (room temperature)
• 4 Tsp Vanilla paste (or 3 Tsp Vanilla Essence)
• 1 Lemon, zested and juiced (6 Tbsp juice and 3 Tsp zest)
• 485 grams Cake Flour
• 2 Tsp Baking Powder
• 2 Tsp Bicarbonate of Soda
• 1 Tsp Salt

• 225 grams Icing Sugar
• 4 Tsp Lime Juice

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 160C degrees, and grease 1x24x11cm bundt cake tin.

Sift the flour, baking powder, bicarb of soda, and salt in a bowl, give it a good stir and set aside.

Bring water to the boil and add the frozen peas. Bring back to the boil, which takes 2 minutes, and then strain and refresh under cold water and set aside.

Add butter and sugar to the OmniBlend jug, and blend increasing to medium speed, using the tamper through the lid to whip the sugar into the butter for a light mixture.

Add the eggs, one at a time, and blend to incorporate and create a fluffy batter. Now add the peas, and blend on high, for about 60 seconds until smooth. And finally add the lemon juice, zest, and vanilla and blend a few seconds until incorporated.

Decant the batter into the bowl with flour, and combine well, ensuring all flour is incorporated. Spoon the batter into the prepared tin, and bake for 1 hour and 10-15 minutes. 

Cool the cake in the tin, and once cooled prepare the frosting. Sift the icing sugar, and add half the amount of lime juice, adding more gradually until you reach the desired consistency. Just runny enough to create a drip effect.

Bake this cake for any occasion and use some decorative sparkles to make it a festive cake for the holidays.

For this recipe we used the OmniBlend I – 2ltr Pro, as it allows for increasing the speed gradually, and the 2 litre jug has a narrow base to works well for blending thick textures like the initial butter and sugar in this recipe as well as hummus, nut butters and other spreads. The 2 liter jug can also be used for grinding dry ingredients if you want to grind your own fresh nut or oat flours.