I make an effort to try dessert recipes that are featured in the Los Angeles Times Culinary S.O.S. column, even though it sometimes takes me a while. I recently tired Girasole's Orange Cake, which was featured in December 2014. This cake is easy to make: you whisk together the dry ingredients (cake flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar); add softened butter; and incorporate the wet ingredients (egg yolks, orange juice and zest, marmalade, and vanilla. (This is the high-ratio method of mixing cake batter, which is a little odd, since this is not actually a high-ratio cake; the weight of the sugar -- about seven ounces -- is not equal to or greater than the weight of the flour.) You spoon the batter into a greased and floured Bundt pan and bake.
I was puzzled after I had transferred the batter into the pan because there wasn't very much of it. I double checked to make sure that I hadn't mis-measured any of the ingredients or used the incorrect size pan. The recipe specifies a "9-inch Bundt pan," and I used an "original" Bundt pan that is about 10 inches across and holds roughly 12 cups of batter -- so it was slightly larger, but not enough to make a material difference. This recipe only calls for two cups of cake flour, so it just doesn't yield a lot of batter. I think that a 6-cup Bundt would be a more appropriate size, or another option would be to double the recipe before baking it in a 12-cup pan.
As a result of having so little batter, my finished cake was very short ("short" in the physical sense, not in baking sense of having a high ratio of butter to flour). Nonetheless, it was a moist and delicious cake with a bright and beautiful orange flavor. You are supposed to serve it with whipped mascarpone, but it was delicious plain. The cake held up well for a couple of days under a dome, but then the texture became a bit crumbly. Just invite some friends over for this beautiful cake to help avoid the problem of leftovers!
Recipe: "Girasole's Orange Cake," recipe printed in the December 25, 2014 Los Angeles Times.
As a result of having so little batter, my finished cake was very short ("short" in the physical sense, not in baking sense of having a high ratio of butter to flour). Nonetheless, it was a moist and delicious cake with a bright and beautiful orange flavor. You are supposed to serve it with whipped mascarpone, but it was delicious plain. The cake held up well for a couple of days under a dome, but then the texture became a bit crumbly. Just invite some friends over for this beautiful cake to help avoid the problem of leftovers!
Recipe: "Girasole's Orange Cake," recipe printed in the December 25, 2014 Los Angeles Times.
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