First, a comment on last night’s soup. It tasted MUCH better today. I still don’t think I’ll make it again, but the time spent in the fridge did wonders.
Today, a cake! “Some kinda cake” as I called it in my now-deleted post from this afternoon. Orange Tea Cake is the actual name, and why did I choose it? Well, it was on the other side of the Creamy Scallion-Mushroom Soup magazine page. I flipped over the recipe and thought to myself, “That’s sort of interesting, and it doesn’t look very hard.” I still ended up going to the grocery store, because I needed blood oranges, sugar (I was almost out), and baking powder (I have an unopened jar of Clabber Girl which expired at the end of last year).
So, I was supposed to use a 9-inch springform pan. I don’t have a springform pan. What I do have is a Pyrex 8 1/2 inch round dish that, until now, I’ve been using for making large quantities of bean dip (it holds 1 1/2 quarts). Now, doing some research on bakeware capacities, I find that the 9-inch would have held 2 1/2 quarts (capacity table here). So, we should all be VERY surprised to find out that the batter filled my dish all the way up to the top. I put a baking sheet underneath the dish because I was afraid it might spill over when it rose (it didn’t, thankfully, but there is an amusing sort of muffin-top to it).
Since I was not using the springform pan, I had to work out how I was going to get the cake out of the pan. I created a two-part sling out of parchment paper that seemed like a good idea, but really wasn’t. I think if I were to do it again, I’d make a circle for the bottom of the dish, and then a tall collar around it. Maybe. I don’t know. That doesn’t sound quite as good an idea as when it was just in my head.
The question is, will I make it again? Probably not. Or if I do, there will need to be some adjustments to the recipe. It’s just kind of… boring. More oranges, or zest, or extract, something to give it a personality. The cake does look perfect on the inside; I was very happy with the texture. It was just missing… zing. Pizazz. Élan. A thesaurus.
Also, it was supposed to have a reddish tint from the blood oranges. It didn’t.