It's been a few weeks since I baked a cake and both MOH and I have been fancying something sweet once we've finished our evening meal. Mostly we've settled for fruit or yogurt ...or ice cream, but it seemed like it was time to bake a cake. So I have.
This week I've moved onto the first of my Nigel Slater stash of books, and there are quite a few! This was the first though, and it's a great book - it's the type of book that you could read and admire even if you weren't a cook. It's laid out in a diary style - well it is called "the kitchen diaries" - with narrative and usually at least one recipe a day.
This was a Christmas present a good few years back and since then I've been a Nigel fan (...hence buying every other Nigel Slater book Amazon sold!)
However I was surprised to read in the intro to this recipe that Nigel "as a rule" doesn't like icing. How very peculiar, but despite this I think I'll remain a fan!
This cake is in essence a pound cake - or rather a 175g cake as that's the quantity of butter, caster sugar and self-raising flour used. There's also a large orange which you use the zest and most of the juice of, three eggs and some marmalade. We had some Whisky marmalade open so it seemed rude not to use this.
The cake is supposed to cook for 40 minutes, and the recipe recommends checking it after 35 minutes. Mine was still very wobbly when I first checked it so it went in for 10-15 minutes longer than the anticipated cooking time before the skewer came out clean.
It was a lovely brown colour and had risen well. Now it just had to cool.
So unlike Nigel, I love icing - however it's become clear that I'm not so good at making it as I am at eating it! Actually that's not true, my buttercream icing for #17: Coffee and Walnut layer cake turned out ok.
The icing for this cake is just icing sugar and orange juice. In a special act of deference to Nigel I even sifted the icing sugar, but it seems I may not have needed as much orange juice as my icing was a little runny.
But of course I didn't realise that until it was on the cake - well actually most of it is probably under the cake, but I'll tell MOH that was the plan all along!!
But other than that it looks ok to me - and wasn't it a good job I used one of those cake tin liner thingys, otherwise it would have got very messy! And the icing would most likely be on the worktop too...
Never mind, I'm sure we'll still manage to eat it!
The verdict
- It was easy to make - I used the food processor for the whole recipe, pulsing in the flour so the mixture was over-worked and it turned out alright (there's only so much deference I can do in one recipe!)
- It tasted good, although I need to work more on my icing so it stays more conventionally on top of the cake! So that means more cake - yay!
- MOH said it was tasty and moist and tasted of marmalade, although he couldn't taste the whisky (...but that's not surprising as it's only 6% in the whole jar!)
I'm linking this post to The Weekend Blog Hop
