In preparation for the Netherlands-Spain final, and for another two days of fieldwork, I spend this Sunday baking.
The Oranje cake may not be everyone’s taste, I haven’t tried the cake itself yet, will have to wait till half time, but the dough was not all that great. I did really like the icing, but its flavour was very different from the cake (dough) so I am not sure how they will taste together. Although most of the icing dripped off the cake after my attempts to make it ORANGE potverdomme and I therefore added too much orange-mango juice and it was too fluid. It just wasn’t really my day. I didn’t want to mess with artificial colouring but the juice just wasn’t orange enough.
Since I have a muffin form and an oven that is large enough to fit the muffin form, I have been really into muffins lately. The muffin cookbook my student assistant gave me is one of the 2 cookbooks that came with me to NZ. I’ve baked the cheese-olive muffins before for my PhD defence, and although my clearest memory of that day is lying down on the floor of my office a few hours before the defence, I think the muffins were quite tasty. Today I realised they may seem a bit Spanish (the recipe even ask for Spanish cheese but I used Gouda), but they’re for fieldwork, not for the final, so that’s ok.
“Oranje cake”
I got the recipe from the internet googling that exact term, but it is in Dutch so I’ll translate it. Also the original recipe forgot to put how much sugar you need and it claims to be for 12 people but uses a 20 cm cake pan. My cake pan is 24 cm so I increased all ingredients by a random factor.
Ingredients:
2 teaspoons anise seeds (or 15 grams “gestampte muisjes” which are ground anise seeds and sugar and Cath should know exactly how to pronounce it)
150 g butter
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
Grated peel of 2 oranges
2 tablespoons orange liquor
150 g sugar (my best guess)
Salt
3 eggs
150 g flour
Teaspoon baking powder
100 g icing sugar
Grind the anise seeds
Mix anise, butter, ground cloves, orange peel, 1 teaspoon orange liquor, sugar and salt. Add eggs one by one. Mix in flour and baking powder. Pour into a greased 20 cm cake pan and bake for 1 hour at 150C.
Let cool
Mix icing sugar with the other tablespoon of orange liquor and glace the cake with this. Let it solidify before serving the cake. Or, if you made it too fluid, let it all drip off the cake and swear.
I decorated it with some orange slices, because I felt that the orangeness of the cake would otherwise not be noticed by others.
I first liked the idea of a cake with anise (and the Dutch corner of the supermarket has gestampte muisjes), but now that I’ve combined it with so much orange I’m not sure if that is such a great combination. Oh and I used orange-mango juice instead of orange liquor thinking it would be more orange, but it also tastes very mango-y. Ah well, every once in a while you should bake a weird cake. I wonder how many people will try out this recipe after I’ve declared it weird?
So on to the muffins. They taste yummy.
Ingredients for 12 muffins:
200 g Manchego (Some Spanish cheese. I used grated Gouda)
100 g green olives in slices
2 twigs Rosemary
250 g flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 eggs
250 g yoghurt
2 teaspoons salt (I don’t know how much salt is in Manchego, but with Gouda you don’t need extra salt)
75 ml oil
Grease muffin form, preheat oven at 180C
Grate or cut the cheese, slice the olives and take the rosemary leaves from the twigs and cut them up finely. Mix flour, baking powder, cheese, 75 g olives and rosemary.
Mix eggs, yoghurt, salt and oil. Mix in the flour mix.
Fill the muffin form with this and decorate with the rest of the olive slices (I always forget this and use all olives from the start).
Bake 20 minutes.
