Orange Layer cake

a slice of orange heaven

It was really an idea that came late to me. I live in Spain now and yet I didn't bake anything with oranges. I found a link to a recipe for an orange cake on a board site I visit (not on 4chan) but I didn't like that cake too much. I took some parts of the recipe and tried to find good alternatives to ingredients they don't have here in Spain. After a stressful hour or two, a cake was born and while it could be sweeter, I think it was very well done. So if you like your cakes sweeter, up the amount of sugar in this one.



Orange Layer cake
For the cake corpus you need:

• 150g soft grain flour or any other soft flour
• a spoon and half on baking powder
• 150g ground almonds
• 3 medium eggs
• 200g granulated sugar
• 2 medium sized oranges

and for the cream:

• 1 vanilla pudding powder
• 400 ml milk
• about 1 cup of orange juice (it's better if it's freshly squeezed)
• 50g granulated sugar
• 150g butter

spreading the cream

1. Preheat the oven to 170 degrees C. Cut the 2 oranges into thin slices and put them in a pot along with about 400 ml of water and 100g of sugar. Cook it on a medium flame for about 20 minutes - they will get nicely soft and glazed. Pick them out and let them cool off.
2. Grease and flour OR put a sheet of baking paper in a cake form (around 20 cm in diameter). Put the nicest slices on the bottom of the cake form. The rest slice into small pieces and set aside.
3. Mix the flour, the baking powder and the almonds in a bowl. In a different bowl, whisker the eggs with the remaining 100g of sugar until puffed and carefully add to the flour mix along with the sliced softened oranges.
4. Stir the mixture until combined and then transfer into the cake form on the oranges. Put in the oven for about 40 minutes until golden. After that let it cool in the form.
5. While the corpus is in the oven, prepare the cream filling. Make thick pudding and then let it cool while stirring occasionally. Boil the orange juice for about 10 minutes until it's thick (or thicker), then let it cool down too. Then add the juice in the pudding and mix in the softened butter. Stir until smooth.
6. Get the corpus off the form so that the oranges are on the top. Cut it horizontally into three pieces. Spread the cream over the slices and put them back together. Let the cake cool in a fridge for few hours and then serve.

Optional idea that I got after I made the cake: if you boil more orange juice, you can use 0,5 cap in the last

part. If you spread a bit of it before spreading the cream, the corpus will get nicely moist and flavoured.

the whole cake in its glory