I have had lots of oranges in my fruit bowl of late. These oranges came to me by way of orange picking from the house next door to the kids I recently minded when I did a stint of nannying. The orange picking was a lot of fun, and I took tonnes of great pictures of the kids. But then I was left with 2 huge bowls of oranges.
So I got to wondering about what I could make with oranges.
Of course, there’s plenty of things you can make with oranges, but I’ve made 4 orange cakes. 2 were orange and poppyseed, one buttery orange cake with glace icing and the other was an orange cake with orange sauce.
All of these cakes were good. The orange and poppy seed I’ve made before. And it was made again due to a request, but out of the 3 cakes it’s my least favourite.
The orange cake with the sauce was so divine. A real adult sort of cake. The cake itself was tangy with rind, but the sauce was marmalade and orange juice and served with double cream it was just divine. I wish I had taken that recipe down.
The buttery one is a real sweet cake. It was easy, really easy to put together, but then these days I make so many cakes that your basic cake is easy to me. It’s a bit of softened butter with sugar creamed, add your eggs, add your flours and then add anything else that goes in it. These days this takes me literally less than 10 mins-from getting the book out of the cupboard to putting the mix in the pan. As long as it doesn’t include grating and juicing 8 oranges that is!
I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed cooking all over again, and getting back into again lately has been fabulous. There’s something to be said for the labour of love that you can eat.
Though perhaps not very adventurous, that I would make 4 orange cakes when there’s lots of other things I could have done such as used them to make sangria, with fish and fennel, in a roast, marmalade, made juice, caramelised them and serve them with cream, the cakes all served their purpose.
And inspired me.
And I needed a good dose of inspiration. So that was good.
