Of course you do, everybody loves oranges. Do you not love oranges? Well. That's too bad, because this recipe is all about oranges. Not just the inside of the fruit, mind you. This recipe includes the rind, the peel (which is the same as the rind...I think), and those little white string-y bits, too (except for the one in the middle of the orange. That thing is gross). With this recipe, you use the whole orange.
Hence the name: Whole Orange Cake.
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| Mmmm, orangey |
SOURCE: Last month's Sunset Magazine. Sunset is a magazine about living in the western half of the US - they have stuff about the Pacific coast states, plus Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Montana...so basically, the entire West. So if you live on the East Coast then....well, too bad. This magazine is not for you. Go enjoy your television programming three hours ahead of those of us out West. (That's how time back East works, right? They get the shows first, while we suffer? I'll be damned if people in NY get to see the season premier of Game of Thrones hours before me!)
STUFF YOU'LL NEED:
- A 10-cup Bundt cake pan. If you don't have one, sorry. I found an old Bundt pan in a corner of a cabinet. Perhaps you, too should scour the corners of your pan-cabinet/drawer/wherever you keep them. There might be a Bundt cake pan from back in the days of yore nestled among other cookware you don't use.
- A food processor. Or a blender.
INGREDIENTS:
For the cake:
Some Pam or other cooking oil spray type thing.
1 Cup Butter softened in the microwave
1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
3 large eggs
3 big navel oranges (or whatever type of oranges you want to use. I used navel. I suppose blood oranges would be pretty cool, but I never know where to find those).
2 1/2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
For the frosting:
2 tablespoons, plus 1 teaspoon of orange juice
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar.
To Make:
1. Preheat your oven to 325 degrees.
2. Mix butter and eggs in a giant bowl. If you have a fancy food mixer, good for you. If you're still broke, as I am, you can use a spoon and call it an extra arm workout. Once the butter and sugar mix is fluffy, add in the eggs and mix those in as well.
3. Set your bowl of sugery butter-egg goodness (I'd put some plastic wrap over it unless you want the cat to get into it), take two of your three oranges and cut them into chunks. Keep the peels on, but take out that icky white stringy thing that's always in the middle of the orange, as well as those weird tough bits on the top. Put the orange chunks into your food processor/blender/whatever, and whirl them round and round and round until nice and smooth looking, but not pureed to hell. Basically, you want to have some orangey chunks in your orangey cake. Add the orangey goodness to the sugary butter-egg mix (removing the plastic cat guard if you used it - or shooing the cat away with sticky orange hands if you didn't. Learn from my mistakes.)
4. Mix the orangey goodness and butter-egg-sugar together until well blended. Then add your flour, salt, baking soda, and baking powder. Stir until your arms feel like they want to fall off (or not, if you have a mix-y thing. I have been informed that we do, in fact, have a mix-y thing that's nearly twenty years old. I intend to clean it and use it because I'll be damned if I can afford to go out and buy the nice one I really really want).
5. Pam the bundt pan (or use whatever cooking spray you happen to like. I'm pretty sure the Pam I've been using is well past it's pull-date, but I haven't died yet, so I'm sure it's all good). Pour in your orangey batter.
6. Bake in the oven for about an hour - start checking for general done-ness at the 45-50 minute mark, using the standard procedure: poke it with a knife, and if it comes out clean (or mostly clean) you're good. Let it cool in it's pan for about 10 minutes, then dump the cake out onto a wire rack (or a plate, if your wire rack is wedged in a drawer and you don't feel like wasting precious moments of your life de-wedging it). Let the cake cool completely, for about an hour or so. Go watch a BBC police drama from the 90s. They're amusing. Make sure you set the cake somewhere where the cat won't get it. My cat showed little interest in the cake once it was fully baked, but this behavior, of course, varies from cat to cat.
7. Once your cake has cooled off entirely, it's time to make the frosting! Hurrah! Find yourself a spare cereal bowl. Then, take your spare orange and cut it into quarters. Using your hands, squeeze the juice out of each quarter into the cereal bowl. If you have something fancy that juices oranges, use that. Because the fun thing about hand-squeezing the juice out of an orange is that the citrus will help you find paper cuts on your hands that you didn't even know you had! All those teeny-tiny paper cuts you get when handling paper. Any paper. But if you can manage to work through the pain and citrus-burns, try to get as much juice out of the orange as possible. Or just use orange juice out of a carton. Which is something I literally didn't think of until after I scrubbed all the juice off my hands.
8. Mix the powdered sugar into the orange juice a little bit at a time, then drizzle it over the cake. Make sure you use all the powdered sugar - if not, the frosting will be all watery and will end up just running off onto the plate. Learn from my mistakes.
9. Eat cake. Mmm.
1. Preheat your oven to 325 degrees.
2. Mix butter and eggs in a giant bowl. If you have a fancy food mixer, good for you. If you're still broke, as I am, you can use a spoon and call it an extra arm workout. Once the butter and sugar mix is fluffy, add in the eggs and mix those in as well.
3. Set your bowl of sugery butter-egg goodness (I'd put some plastic wrap over it unless you want the cat to get into it), take two of your three oranges and cut them into chunks. Keep the peels on, but take out that icky white stringy thing that's always in the middle of the orange, as well as those weird tough bits on the top. Put the orange chunks into your food processor/blender/whatever, and whirl them round and round and round until nice and smooth looking, but not pureed to hell. Basically, you want to have some orangey chunks in your orangey cake. Add the orangey goodness to the sugary butter-egg mix (removing the plastic cat guard if you used it - or shooing the cat away with sticky orange hands if you didn't. Learn from my mistakes.)
4. Mix the orangey goodness and butter-egg-sugar together until well blended. Then add your flour, salt, baking soda, and baking powder. Stir until your arms feel like they want to fall off (or not, if you have a mix-y thing. I have been informed that we do, in fact, have a mix-y thing that's nearly twenty years old. I intend to clean it and use it because I'll be damned if I can afford to go out and buy the nice one I really really want).
5. Pam the bundt pan (or use whatever cooking spray you happen to like. I'm pretty sure the Pam I've been using is well past it's pull-date, but I haven't died yet, so I'm sure it's all good). Pour in your orangey batter.
6. Bake in the oven for about an hour - start checking for general done-ness at the 45-50 minute mark, using the standard procedure: poke it with a knife, and if it comes out clean (or mostly clean) you're good. Let it cool in it's pan for about 10 minutes, then dump the cake out onto a wire rack (or a plate, if your wire rack is wedged in a drawer and you don't feel like wasting precious moments of your life de-wedging it). Let the cake cool completely, for about an hour or so. Go watch a BBC police drama from the 90s. They're amusing. Make sure you set the cake somewhere where the cat won't get it. My cat showed little interest in the cake once it was fully baked, but this behavior, of course, varies from cat to cat.
7. Once your cake has cooled off entirely, it's time to make the frosting! Hurrah! Find yourself a spare cereal bowl. Then, take your spare orange and cut it into quarters. Using your hands, squeeze the juice out of each quarter into the cereal bowl. If you have something fancy that juices oranges, use that. Because the fun thing about hand-squeezing the juice out of an orange is that the citrus will help you find paper cuts on your hands that you didn't even know you had! All those teeny-tiny paper cuts you get when handling paper. Any paper. But if you can manage to work through the pain and citrus-burns, try to get as much juice out of the orange as possible. Or just use orange juice out of a carton. Which is something I literally didn't think of until after I scrubbed all the juice off my hands.
8. Mix the powdered sugar into the orange juice a little bit at a time, then drizzle it over the cake. Make sure you use all the powdered sugar - if not, the frosting will be all watery and will end up just running off onto the plate. Learn from my mistakes.
9. Eat cake. Mmm.
LAST MADE: Couple Friday's ago.
RESULT: Very good, but don't leave it in the fridge overnight or else it'll be pretty tough to chew.
INJURIES: None, but you could count the vanilla cookie thumb burn, since I made this cake the same night. I was using the top oven rack for the cake, and the bottom rack for the cookies. The burn was the result of my thumb hitting the top rack taking the cookies out. Plus. squeezing the oranges made my hands feel sore - sore enough I became convinced I had some sort of flesh eating bacteria eating my hands. Turns out I didn't, though.
COMPLICATIONS: The cat tried to get into the dough. Again. Had to lift her off the counter whilst covered up to my elbows in orangey goo. Poor cat got orangey-dough on her. Was hard to find because the cat is orange in color.
FOR NEXT TIME: Use riper oranges; maybe some more sugar; use orange juice from a carton for frosting so I don't have to hand squeeze an orange, making my hands sore and making me all paranoid about flesh eating bacteria.
Next time...Cheese Crackers!
Next time...Cheese Crackers!
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