The rumors of our disappearance are greatly exaggerated. We just had the start of term to deal with, so we have not been posting much that was not school related. Both the wife and I do have some posts. We did a few fun cooking things for the New Year, though not much since. The one I want to tell you today is the infamous orange marmalade cake.

Now, before we get to the cake proper I have two, connected, stories to tell. The first I got second hand from Coowee, Valah’s mother. This is the story of the New Year’s Eve cake. You see, ever since I started dating Valah and attending her family functions one of their New Year’s traditions is that they bake a cake, usually a box mix in a sheet pan, and everyone writes their name in frosting on the cake. The size of your name is the size piece you get cut after midnight. So I asked Coowee this year how that got started. So, when Valah was in middle school her cousin Karisa and Karisa’s best friend Pickles (of course it is a nick name!) decided one New Year’s that they wanted to bake a cake. As I understand it, they did not know much about that process, but gave it a go. I of course was not there, but you can imagine a pair of middle school aged girls attempting to make a cake. From that spur of the moment impulse the New Year’s Eve cake was born. Along with this, in Valah’s family, the assembled play board games, or put together puzzles and then make a lot of noise at midnight.

My family never really had a specific tradition. Some years we went to friends’ houses and enjoyed the company of others, some we stayed home. During my time with the TV station I spend most of my New Year’s Eves working, including New Year’s 2000. That was actually quite a fun adventure, even if I did literally clock 24.5 hours that day. After attending Valah’s family get-togethers I can understand why she always wants to be there.

The second story took place last year, and I was involved. So, last year we traveled to Oregon to be with families over the holidays. My family is in Southern Oregon, Valah’s in Portland. Often one family gets us for Christmas eve/day and the other for New Year’s eve/day. Last year we were with Valah’s family for New Year’s. We were in fact staying with her aunt Sandy, who usually hosts New Year’s. Earlier in the day we visited Powel’s City of Books, a pilgrimage we make every time we go to Portland. Valah found a cookbook, the Mitford Cookbook to be exact. Mitford is the name of a fictional town that is the focus of a book series that she, her mother, and Sandy have read. They detail the life of the local priest and his interactions with his parishioners. I have been told the books would not really appeal to me.

Valah decided to get the book for Sandy, as she is a big Mitford fan. The first thing Sandy did was to look and see s if there was a recipe for Esther’s famous orange marmalade cake. This cake is famous in the books. It seems almost its own character. The cookbook has an excerpt from one of the novels as the local ladies are desperately trying to get the recipe from Esther for a local bake sale as she fell and broke her jaw, so cannot tell them how to make the cake. The ladies worry without her cake, they will not be able to sell anything. All in all, it is pretty funny.

Somehow, and I am not sure how this all came about, but I agreed to make this cake for the New Year’s cake. We needed comes ingredients which Valah and I nipped out and got, when we returned we got to work on this cake. Karisa was there with her three kids. Her two oldest, who were 4 and 3 I believe, helped out some. Both were quite mesmerized watching me add ingredients to the bowl on the stand mixer. They also both did a great job rolling the oranges so I could juice them. The cake turned out to be a success, so this year there could be no other cake for us to make.

Sandy had made me a copy of the recipe, but I am not sure where I put it, so I looked around online and found it here. The instructions are pretty strait forward, and it is not that hard of a cake to make. It does call for cake flour, which is a softer flour that has been ground finer then your average AP flour. Once the batter was assembled and in the pans we had some time kill. I think we were watching some football, but I do not quite remember. Valah did make dinner that night, but that is another blog post.

Gotta have the cake flour

Assembled batter ingredients

ready for the oven

When we were getting the oranges for the recipe I noticed they had blood oranges, which are my second favorite orange. My favorite is a green orange I had while I was in Costa Rica. I have never seen anything like that here unfortunately. Both the green one, sweet orange flavor. Blood oranges get their name from their blood red pulp and are pretty much the standard orange in Italy. So the juice it makes up is of course red. This meant that it left a pink color on the cake after the soaking step.

Orange on the outside

Red on the inside!

You can see a bit of the pink hue after the soak

Now, frosting cakes is something I am not too good at. Nor is it a skill I am working to develop much, as I really do not make cakes all that much. Normally Valah is the baker and I am the cook. Still, somehow this cake is my cake to make. Thankfully the sour cream frosting that this cake calls for hid my assembly crimes well. I had purchased a bit of green gel frosting for writing names. We did Kelly’s name as he was already in bed. That is what comes from working a morning shift on New Year’s day. The cake was good; I quite liked it with the blood orange over the normal orange. I do plan on making this cake sometime with lemons and lemon curd over oranges, just to see. I might even try limes once, if the lemons work. That was not all the New Year’s cooking we did. As I mentioned, Valah cooked dinner, and I did something special for the first breakfast of 2017. Stay tuned!

One layer

Two layers!

Frosted!

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