This mango season certainly has been abundant! We all love eating mangoes in our house and couldn’t resist buying trays of them from roadside sellers and local markets over the past few weeks.

The awesome thing about mangoes is that they freeze really well. I usually chop the mango and in bite size pieces and pop them in small take-away food containers. I have also pureed mangoes and used ice cube trays to make mango ice cubes.

I was sitting at my desk enjoying a mango lassi when I remembered a delicious mango cake that I had made a few years back. The recipe for this cake came from a Vietnamese cookbook that I was given as a gift.

All of a sudden I wanted mango cake!

Unfortunately, the timing of this didn’t fit into my plans as

a) I didn’t have any macadamia nuts (an important ingredient of the recipe)

b) It was almost dinner time and I hadn’t even started making dinner yet (hungry kids = grumpy kids!)

As you can see, I had to put my plans to make a mango cake on hold.

The day I finally made the cake was a perfect occasion as I was meeting friends in the afternoon and I knew that they would like the cake just as much as I do.

Here is the recipe for Mango Cake below.

Ingredients

1 cup unsalted macadamia nuts (I used raw macadamia nuts and toasted them in a frypan)

3 large mangoes, about 750g

225g butter, softened

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup caster sugar

4 large eggs

2 cups plain flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 cup roasted macadamia nuts, chopped (this will be to swirl through the cake batter)

 

 

Method

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.

Whizz up macadamia nuts in food processor.

Peel and chop your mangoes. Save about 85g of mango pieces to swirl through the cake batter.  Puree the rest of the mango.

Cream butter, vanilla extract and sugar together until thick and fluffy.

Add the eggs one at a time to the butter mixture and beat well after each egg addition.

In a separate bowl, combine whizzed up nuts, flour and baking powder.

Mix the butter mixture and flour mixture together. Then gently stir the mango puree through.

Almost done….now pop your cake batter into a tin – I used a round 23cm springform cake tin lined with baking paper.

Get your saved mango pieces and 1/2 cup chopped macadamia nuts and sprinkle these over the top of the cake batter and swirl them through.

Cook for 1 hour. Check your cake after an hour because in my oven I did need to cook it for a further 15 minutes….In the meantime you can make a nutmeg cream to serve alongside the cake as suggested in the cookbook that this recipe came from. To do this, whip two cups of cream with 1 teaspoon of nutmeg.

I’m not a nutmeg fan so this addition is not for me. However, our general store sells a delicious Jersey cream from the dairy up the road and it is delish alongside this cake!

PS If you can’t get mangoes, I believe peaches would be fantastic in this recipe as well.

PPS Don’t be tempted to put extra mango in…I swirled more than the recommended 85grams through the cake batter and it did turn out a bit doughy. (still scrumptious though!)

Special Bonus Recipe – Stir Fry Bunya Nuts

I was just going to let you know about this scrumptious mango cake recipe today. However the other morning on my bike ride through the state forest, I saw some bunya nuts on the side of the road. I stopped and collected some of these nuts.

To prepare the bunya nuts, I boiled them in water for a couple of hours. I forgot to add salt to the water but because I knew I was creating a stir-fry with them, it didn’t matter so much. However, adding salt does make a difference if you were eating them plain.

For dinner the following night, we had a lovely side dish of bunya nut stir fry with Ceylon spinach. I used garlic oil to fry the nuts and spinach in. I left the coriander on the side because no one else in my family likes it but me.

Yum, Yum!

What are some of your favourite mango recipes? We would love to hear them. Please share in the comments below.