Spanish saffron cake

Saffron is such a glorious spice, it adds a beautiful colour and a distinct flavour to dishes. It is expensive, but you only need a pinch. I've been rummaging through my old magazine clippings, and came across a Spanish saffron tea bread recipe from BBC Good Food (March 2000).
I decided to bake it as a cake rather than bread-shaped, and also omitted the mixed peel, as my older son doesn't like "bits" in cakes. He would pick them all out and throw, and as I planned to put a slice of cake in his lunch box, I made it plain.

Put a pinch of saffron threads in a bowl of hot milk (150ml), cover it with the lid, and let it infuse the milk. Leave it for an hour to acquire a deep yellow colour.
In a big mixing bowl beat 2 eggs with 140g caster sugar and zest from 1 orange. Add 6tbsp of orange juice (the magazine suggests juice from 2 oranges, but maybe they used small-sized ones, as I used one orange, and there were about 7tbsp of juice). Add the ground almonds (100g), 350g self-raising flour and mix well. Add the melted butter (175g). The magazine suggests rubbing the cold butter with flour, but I just melted it to speed up the process.
At the last stage add the milk with saffron. mix well. Pour the cake batter in a round cake tin or loaf tin if you prefer and place it in the oven preheated to 180C. Bake for about 45+ minutes. Check the readiness with a wooden skewer.
Take the tin out, and let the cake cool before glazing with a mix of icing sugar and orange juice, or pour some honey over.

This is a lovely cake, crumbly and fluffy.
Apparently it improves with keeping. If you can keep it for 2 days before slicing, the depth of flavour is more pronounced. Not that we would know, as I don't think we'll have much left for tomorrow.

Janice from Farmersgirl Kitchen has launched a new linky called #RecipeClippings, which invites you to go through your recipe collection (either organised in files, or piled all over the house like in my case) and choose a recipe to recreate. So, I'm sending this recipe to Janice's exciting challenge.

Also adding this post to #Bakeoftheweek linky run by Helen at Casa Costello.