Of all things I cook, I find cakes are rarely wildly successful the first time you give a recipe a whirl, but once is usually enough to let you see whether the bones are good and to adjust and annotate the recipe for future reference.

And so it was with this Orange Cake from BBC Australian Good Food magazine: May 2010 (p.128).

We had a ton of delicious oranges and a willingness to give something that wasn’t chocolate a bash. It had been ages since I made an iced cake and despite being over-cooked a smidge and an icing debacle, it really was very, very nice, very simple and we would definitely cook again.

Recipes from magazines do fit my esoteric recipe reproduction rules – thus is shown below.

23.09.10

Cooked by: Carol and Joe/Frank

Orange Cake

• 100g unsalted butter
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup caster sugar
• 2/3 cup pure icing sugar
• 2/3 cup self-raising flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/3 cup orange juice

1. Preheat oven to 180C
2. Grease 20cm cake tin, line base with baking paper
3. Melt butter on medium heat. Cool (it doesn’t matter terribly if you don’t cool it completely).
4. With electric mixer beat eggs, caster and icing sugar until thick and creamy. Still in butter.
5. Sift flour and baking powder over egg mixture. Add orange juice and mix until just combined. Pour into prepared pan. Bake for 30 minutes **CHECK AFTER 20 minutes**, until a skewer inserted comes out clean. Cool in pan for 5 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack.
6. When cold, stab cake in a few places with skewer. Ice. I chucked a bit of orange zest on top to make it pretty

Here is where it all went awry:
Icing

• 2/3 cup pure icing sugar
• juice of half an orange

1. Mix together icing sugar and juice

You can see what is wrong here already, and what I should have seen in I had engaged my brain for a moment – juice of half an orange is a ridiculous measure. Especially, as I discovered, I had chosen to use seemingly the juiciest orange in the universe.

I didn’t think about previous icing making experience (though, admittedly, it has been some years since I have made an iced cake) and mindlessly mixed the icing sugar and juice together.

What I should have done, of course, was gradually added the juice to the icing sugar until I achieved the consistency I was after. And instead of starting again, I ploughed on and simply added more and more icing sugar until I had way more icing than necessary.

Nonetheless it proved to be quite wonderful.

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