Back to Regularly Scheduled Programming with A Gâteau à l'Orange

It's been a bit of a whirlwind around here these last few days. I feel like I'm doing eight things at once all online. It's a good feeling even though I don't think I have enough of a sleep reserve for it; this manifests itself in the fact that usually the more things I have to do, the more efficient I become, and right now I'm not being as efficient as I could be.
I want to thank everyone who's contributed to the Haiti Relief Effort so far both on this blog and through the Twitter campaign. Every comment helps more than you can imagine so thank you to everyone who left at least one comment here to help us out. So far, nearly $14K have been raised here and almost $5K on Twitter so I'm very pleased. Remember that every comment you leave until January 31st counts toward the total.

And for those of you who have been patient enough to wait for me to get back to the more regular pursuits of this blog, here's a cake for you. This cake has been blogged about elsewhere already as a result of my disseminating the recipe I'd found, but if you've seen this cake on another blog, probably Deeba's, you can see that my version of it is Cinderella at her stepmother's house, and her version is Cinderella at the ball. Either way, it's delicious and if you love citrus a fraction as much as I do, you should definitely try it.

It's winter and with winter comes revelry (and its remains), snow (sometimes), and above all citrus.
Let me be perfectly clear about this: I'm ethnically Iranian folks, and if any of you know any Persian people, you know we love our citrus. As I said to Deeba and she quoted me back on her blog: We're a bit obsessive and weird about our citrus fruit. We hoard it, display it, eat it, drink it, preserve it, dry it, cook it, and I'm sure we'd bake it too if there were a tradition like that of Western baking in Iran, heck we'd probably wear oranges and lemons if we could find a way to. When my father was a three year-old boy in Tehran, he would sneak into the pantry to drink the freshly squeezed and bottled lemon juice. Did you catch the part about his being three years old?

Nowadays, he will eat a whole 2Kg (4lb) bag of oranges at one sitting while reading the newspaper or working at his computer. And while my obsession at the age of seven lay with sipping red wine vinegar I'd have snuck in a cup back to my bedroom rather than lemon juice, I think you get the point that my family and tart and acidic foods, citrus being a prime group of these, are a tight-knit bunch. So the first time I had an orange cake that really tasted like it had orange in it, albeit not that much, but more than an orange pound cake, I became obsessed with finding a truly orange-tasting recipe.

You'd be surprised at how few there are. In fact, I don't really know of any other orange cake recipes that are so rich with real orange flavor. It took a lot of traipsing across the internet to find this recipe and, of all places, I found it on a Swiss site about Haiti. Ah now you see it, how I should have posted this recipe earlier, but somehow posting it now makes everything come full circle since I've been using this space to raise funds for Haiti instead.

The difference is in all the orange juice that goes into this cake. 4 oranges' worth, and how half of that goes in right after the cake is baked, rather than pouring some sort of glaze over it. As I said to Deeba, this cake is like a very light cheesecake in its consistency; the egg whites don't give it volume, they just prevent it from becoming a flat puck.

You could always try to make it with clementines instead of oranges or whatever other kind of citrus you want to try. I've been meaning to make a lemon version of this cake, but what I really want to try is a yuzu version. Alas, where is one to find fresh yuzu anywhere in Europe? Perhaps one of you wants to send me yuzu for my citrus gateau experiments, until then I guess I'll just have to be patient...
I want to take this opportunity to wish my dear friend Jamie a very happy birthday. If you don't know her blog, it's Life's a Feast and she is a brilliant writer, so run over there, don't walk, and wish her a happy birthday while you're at it.


Gâteau à l'Orange
translated and adapted from here
Serves 8

4 oranges
100g (1/2 cup - 2 tsp) of softened butter
100g (1/2 cup) sugar
150g (1 1/4 cup) flour
3 eggs
1 packet (1 1/2 tsp) of baking powder (= 7 or 11g depending on which label so ~8 is usually enough)
1 Tbsp Rhum
1 Tbsp Cointreau
1 pinch of salt
10g (2 tsp) of butter (to grease the pan)

Preparation: 1h30

For the cake:
- Heat the oven to 170C (325F).
- Grease a cake pan (I used an 8" springform which I greased and then covered with baking parchment, the butter makes it adhere and it's easier to remove the cake when it's done)
- In a bowl, beat the sugar and softened butter together.
- Separate the whites from the yolks and set the whites aside for now. Add the yolks one by one to the butter and sugar mixture, taking care to mix each one thoroughly before adding the next one and beat until you obtain a smooth batter.
- Add the Rhum and the Cointreau and mix again.
- Mix the flour and baking powder together and add it to the batter by "raining it in". Mix well.
- Zest 1 orange to obtain a tsp of orange zest (I actually get a lot more out of one orange and use it all in the batter). Cut in half and juice the oranges. Pour half of the resulting juice in the batter, add the zest and mix.
- Beat the whites until firm with the pinch of salt. Add them delicately to the batter.
- Pour the batter into the pan and bake for an hour, checking the coloration from time to time. It will be dark orange when done.
- Pour the other half of the juice into the cake while it's still warm. Take care not to pour it too fast and not to let the cake cool too much before you do so. You may find, as I did on my first attempt, that if you don't get the timing right, your whole cake will not have juice in it (as in it may have two different textures and have a visible line halfway down where the juice stopped penetrating).