GLUTEN-FREE BLOOD ORANGE CAKE

As winter is coming to an end, I’m not going to miss the biting, windy, cold. I’m not going to miss waking up to snowy and ice only on the mornings I have to leave the house. And I’m certainly not going to miss the gray skies and icy rain.

What I will miss is the abundance of good, juicy, citrus fruits. I know you can get lemons, limes, and oranges all year round. But there’s a variety of citrus that you only see during the winter months. One of those is blood oranges.

I’m not going to lie — blood oranges taste a lot like regular oranges. Sometimes you get one that has a slight cranberry or tart raspberry flavor. But what sets them apart is the deep, red color that contrasts nicely with their orange skin.

My favorite way to use them is to bake with them, and a gluten-free cake made with Ava Jane’s Kitchen Avocado Oil is the perfect thing to make. It’s the perfect dessert for those days between winter and spring — bright and sunny, tender, floral, and delicate.

You can remove the rind from the blood oranges that go on top of the cake if you wish. Sprinkling them with sugar definitely takes away some of the bitterness, but removing it helps a lot. Either way, you want to slice them as thin as you can.