Moist orange and lemon cake

Happy weekend everyone! I started my weekend yesterday in the best possible way. I took the train to Roskilde to visit my sweet grandmother, and spent the night there. We had such a good time, baking, cooking, drinking wine and talking. And talking we did a lot of! I just love hearing her stories about what life was like fifty years ago, about meeting my grandfather and lots of other things. For their honeymoon they took his motorcycle and drove down through Europe and to keep warm they stuffed old newspapers under their shirts. How cool is that!

But while all these stories were being told, we managed to bake a cake. And what a cake! It was extremely moist and the citrus flavor was really, really nice. We found the recipe in one of my grandmother’s bindings as a clip out of a magazine. It doesn’t say which magazine or when it is from through, so I can’t really reference it.

Here’s what you need to make it:

250 g./8,8 oz. soft butter

275 g.79,7 oz. sugar

5 big eggs (I used six because my eggs were very small)

1/4 teaspoon salt

Grated peel of 2 organic oranges

235 g./8,2 oz. flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

Juice of 1 1/2 oranges

Juice of 1 1/2 lemons

175 g./6 oz. powdered sugar

How:

Turn the oven to 175C/350F. Separate the egg whites from the egg yolks. Then with an electric mixer, whisk the butter and sugar until “foamy” and thoroughly combined. Then add the egg yolks one at a time while beating. My grandmother has a kitchen aid mixer, and I am completely in love with it! If only I had the room for it and the money to buy it!

Then add the salt, orange peel, flour and baking powder little by little until it is nicely combined. Then, in another bowl, whisk the egg whites until they are stiff and form peaks. Fold the whites gently into the batter until it is beautiful and uniform.

Butter a springform, and add the batter to it. Bake it for 50-60 minutes, or until a pin comes out clean when you poke it. While the cake is in the oven, juice the oranges and lemons. Add the powdered sugar to the juice and warm it up until the powdered sugar is dissolved.

And then the fun part. When the cake is done, you poke the hell out of it with a knitting pin (or another kind of pin). Every centimeter should pretty much be poked. Like this:
And then you gently pour the juice over the cake. Make sure to distribute it pretty evenly.

And then it is all about letting the cake absorb all the goodness of the fruit juice, and become very moist and yummy. We let it cool for about an hour. That’s as long as we could wait.

It is so hard having a cake just sitting there, waiting for you! We had it with out afternoon coffee, and it was perfect! You can decorate it with some powdered sugar, or just eat it the way it is. Enjoy!