Orange juice tea cake.

[gurdymonkey]

Occasionally an idea takes up space rent-free in my head. A couple of months back, one of my internet friends posted a recipe for a tea cake made with Earl Grey tea. It's a perfectly nice recipe as is, but somewhere in the past couple of Covid-booster-haze, my brain said, "What if you made it with orange juice?"
So I did, just now, realizing it could be an interesting failure.

4oz (8 tbsp.) butter*

6oz (a little over a cup) dried cranberries

4 to 6 oz (1/2 cup to 3/4 cup)** golden caster sugar, though regular cane sugar works fine.

9oz (2 cups) self raising flour (If you can't buy it, add 1 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1/4 tsp salt to each cup of all purpose flour.)

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (this is baking soda.)

*1/2 teaspoon salt (SKIP if you used salted butter)

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 pint (2 cups) orange juice

Preheat oven to 350F

Combine orange juice, butter and 1/2 cup of sugar in a saucepan on low heat, stir until melted. Add cranberries to the liquid.

Sieve the remaining dry ingredients into a mixing bowl. Stir in the juice/fruit mix. **Taste the batter. If the orange juice seems too tangy, spoon a bit more sugar into the batter, taste, repeat as necessary.

Pour into a 1lb loaf tin and bake for 30 - 40 minutes or when a skewer goes in and comes out clean.

First problem: the batter overflowed the pan after about 10 minutes in the oven - fortunately I have an old cookie sheet in the bottom of the oven, so it wasn't that hard to clean up.

Second problem: one of the other tenants came home while it was cooling and there was a door-slam which may have been inadvertent - it's been crazy windy all afternoon. Anyway, when I turned the loaf upside down and removed the pan, the middle of the cake had fallen.

Nice orange flavor, even with the added sugar was not overly sweet. It could be nice with a simple drizzle icing made with orange juice and confectioner's sugar, but I don't think it needs it. Might try baking it in a 9 X 9 brownie pan next time as it would have more space to rise without the overflow problem. Or maybe as muffins. Or maybe I need a bigger loaf pan....

Comments

[danabren]

Sob, that sounds delicious.

[gurdymonkey]

In a weird cascade of friend-of-friend comments after I posted this to Facebook, the chemistry doesn't work, which is why the batter rose too much and then collapsed in on itself like a yummy, yummy orange flavored black hole.

Not sure I care enough to tinker with it. It tastes good, that's sufficient for now.

[danabren]

As we say in this house, "shut up and eat it".