I asked my friend, Martine (beauty therapist, pilates teacher, cat lover, cake whisperer, life guru extraordinaire), for a clementine cake recipe and she recommended this one. It’s from a Rick Stein book but it was by Maggie Agostini. We chatted about the fact that some people have the “cake touch” and can turn out something lovely without losing their mind, while others will really struggle with a simple recipe because cake making is alchemy to them. We agreed, quite wisely, that confidence comes from understanding the process and the ability to read a recipe properly and get cracking. What happened next is a lesson in hubris.
Ingridients
You will need:
- 250 grams of salted butter
- 250 grams of caster sugar
- 250 grams of self-raising flour
- 4 medium eggs
- one and a half teaspoons of orange zest
- 85 ml of freshly squeezed orange juice (you probably need one big orange for all of this)
- 125 g icing sugar
- 5 teaspoons of freshly squeezed orange juice
Heat the oven to 170°C/150°C fan/gas mark 3. Line a deep 20cm cake tin before you make the batter. You want one that unclips.
Cream the butter and sugar together. Once it’s a pale mix that you want to stick your finger in, beat in the eggs. Do this one at a time. Crack the egg into a bowl first, then add to the mix. I know this seems like a faff but there are two good reasons for this. First, if you have a rotten egg and you put it straight into the creamed sugar and butter you are starting again. Secondly, trying to retrieve a bit of shell from cake batter is much harder and messier than getting it out of an egg white in a bowl. When you add the fourth egg add a tablespoon of flour to the mix so the mixture doesn’t curdle. Add the orange zest, then tip in all the flour and mix well. You don’t want to see any dry ingredients. Then you can add the 85ml of orange juice. Slowly mix in.
Pour the mixture into the tin and put it in the oven for 45 to 50 minutes. It will be done when you can put a metal skewer in the middle of the cake and it comes out clean.
Let it cool enough to release from the tin and then put it on a cooling rack which is sitting on a tea towel or kitchen paper. Mix the remaining orange juice and icing sugar. Now the recipe calls for an orange icing but I added much more juice so I got an orange gloop and then poured it over the warm cake as a drizzle. It sinks in and is delicious.
Now, isn’t that easy? Isn’t that simple? Isn’t that wonderful? Yes, but I am an eejit. As the cake went into the oven and I was feeling smug about the ease of preparation and how tidy the kitchen was I screamed “get it out” and had to pull the cake out of the oven. Why? Because I had forgotten to add the orange juice to the batter. Yes, I had forgotten to add the orange to an orange cake recipe. I am a massive spanner. The husband and I got the batter back into the mixer from the hot tin. Who knew that metal conducted heat that well! I added the orange juice and remixed the batter. Rather than give the non-orange, orange cake to friends we turned this into fairy cakes and a small sponge cake and started again. The rescue cake as it will now be known was delicious. The second attempt was also bloody lovely.
So I can say some things with confidence. This is a great recipe that can withstand some messing about. You should always read the recipe and prepare the oven and tins before you start. Refer to the recipe as you go. Finally, if you are making an orange cake and you’ve not added any orange to it you might need to read that recipe again.