I have a board on Pinterest called Recipes I have to try.
‘Pinning’ interesting-looking recipes onto this board is fun and at the same time by far and away the easiest way to save them without cutting out, putting in a scrapbook or creating a recipe file online.
However.
This month it was my turn to have the neighbours to tea and I had been mulling over in my mind what exactly I was going to make.
The usual pattern is two tuzlu and two tatlı ie two savoury dishes and two sweet. But I knew what I wanted to try and it was two delectable cakes I had saved on my special board.
One in particular, with its eye-catching photograph of a loaf cake topped with vibrant ruby red slices of orange. It looked amazing.
Just look at it:
Planning ahead, I bought my blood oranges from the market, and with anticipation – I love nothing better than the challenge of a new recipe – got out my mixing bowl and baking ingredients one day last week.
Then I brought my laptop into the kitchen to find that recipe. That was easy.
I clicked through to the actual website to find the instructions and what should I see but what looked like Polish: something totally incomprehensible at any rate. Well, you can imagine what I thought. Yes, exactly.
Oh no, I thought to myself. Amazing photographs yes, but not one word could I understand.
But I was skimming down, feeling more and more irritated, and eventually spotted in small print Scroll down for English version.
To cut a long story short, there is a happy ending: this recipe is excellent.
It makes a truly delicious loaf cake, every mouthful light and moist, using ingredients that we usually have in our store cupboards.
All except orange blossom water -not a staple for me I have to say, but I substituted plain orange juice instead which was just fine. But the point is that Pinterest is a site based on sharing images so be careful: often the photos are better than the recipes!
But this time the photos were fantastic and the recipe – once I got to it – certainly matched up.
So here’s the recipe for Yogurt Cake with Blood Oranges from a blog intriguingly called Chili & Tonka:
- Preheat oven to 180C/350F degrees.
- Grease and flour a standard loaf tin (5¼ x 9¼in/ 13 x 23 cm)
- Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.
- Using your fingers, rub the lemon zest into the sugar in a large bowl until sugar is moist and fragrant.
- Add yogurt, oil, orange blossom water, eggs, and vanilla extract. Whisk to blend. Fold in dry ingredients with a rubber spatula just to blend. Don’t over mix.
- Pour the batter into your prepared tin and smooth the top.
- Peel the oranges and cut them into THIN slices. Arrange on top of the cake. Overlapping if fine. NB One orange may be enough.
- Bake about 50-60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.
- Let cake cool in pan on a wire rack for 15 minutes. Invert onto rack and let it cool completely.
- Additionally you can brush the top of the cake with liquid fruit jelly or other glaze. Here the recipe leaves you on your own. This is what I did:
- for glaze:
- Sieve approx. 2 tbsp apricot jam into a small saucepan and add the juice of ½ lemon. Using a whisk helps.
- Stir over the heat until ingredients are blended, then bring to the boil and simmer for a minute.
- Let cool slightly then brush over the cake. You can do this a day in advance and it will still be shiny the next day. I really recommend the glaze as it brings out that fabulous colour.
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