Caaaaaaaaaaaaaake!

Orange Sour Cream Cake with orange icing, to be specific. No, not my recipe, but I've been eating a lot of it lately, and it's really good but it needs a couple tweaks. Plus, I feel like if I don't post something now, I'm just going to keep procrastinating and then it'll be almost a year later before I post something again. It's not that I don't have stuff that I can write about here- oh, I've got stuff, alright; really tasty stuff. But I've been busy, and I procrastinate a lot. Hopefully once I get into my new apartment things will get better. And hopefully I'll have better lighting. The lighting here sucks. Anyway, back to the cake.

I took a couple photos of mine, which I'll add here later but not right now, but here's their recipe-

Orange Sour Cream Cake

3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. vanilla
8 oz. butter
1 1/2 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup fresh orange juice
3 tablespoons fresh orange zest

Orange Icing

1 1/4 cups powdered sugar
1 tsp. zest
2-3 tablespoons orange juice
Preheat oven to 350, prepare pans by greasing them and dusting with flour.
For the cake, begin by creaming together the sugar and butter. Slowly add the sour cream, eggs and vanilla until thoroughly combined. In a separate bowl, sift together the dry ingredients. Slowly add dry ingredients, mix until smooth. Add orange juice and zest, mix to combine. Place into prepared pans. If baking in 1 pan, bake for about 1 hour or until cake tests done. If baking in 2 pans, bake for about 30-35 minutes or until cakes test done.


Not much need be changed, but my version ended up with an extra half-cup or so of sour cream by accident- not sure if it affected it for better or worse, but if anything, I suspect it was for the better. But the main modifications that I made were these-

Where it calls for orange juice- try substituting orange juice concentrate, instead. I made it according to the original recipe the first time (minus the zest, because I'm just not a zest fan, really) and while it was good, and orange-y even, it wasn't orange-y enough. Trust me, use the concentrate. Also, even though I left out the zest (well, I did add one orange's worth, which probably wouldn't even be noticeable) I did happen to find some dried orange peel that I bought awhile ago and forgot I had, so I added a whole bunch of that! I don't remember how much, maybe half a cup? Third of a cup? Something like that. Actually, I think what it was, was a quarter of a cup to slightly less than half of the cake mix- to compare one with and one without, I divided it into two cakes, one being larger than the other, and added the quarter cup to the smaller one; so it would've ended up being something like a half-cup total. Or something like that. It was a lot, that's all I know. And after comparing the two, the one with the dried orange peel was clearly the winner in taste. Much more orange flavor. I'm not sure how much flavor difference there is between dried orange peel and fresh orange zest, but I'm guessing the d.o.p. is a lot more concentrated. Not to mention a lot less work than the zest. So I highly recommend buying that and using it instead of the zest. Then again, I'm biased because I really didn't use (much) zest at all. Still, that's my game plan from here on out.

Orange icing...

Hmmm... what to say..? Again, I left the zest (and this time, also the d.o.p.) out of this one, so I don't know how much of a difference it would have made, but I gotta say, the recipe as they have it here- 1 1/4 cups of powdered sugar to 2-3 T o.j.? Waaay to overpoweringly sweet. I couldn't do it. Just couldn't do it. I tweaked it a lot and messed around with it aplenty, and in the end I just ended up going with 1. a bunch of powdered sugar, 2. a pinch of salt, 3. o.j. concentrate, and 4. fresh squeezed lemon juice (about half a lemon). Basically I started with the sugar in a bowl, added the salt, then kept adding the concentrate until it got to about the consistency I wanted. Then added some lemon juice for balance. It was pretty good too, actually. But I think next time I'm just going to try out some straight o.j. concentrate; maybe add a pinch of salt (and a pinch of baking soda to counteract the acidity) but not much else.

Overall, this cake is delicious and very much worth your time. And the author was right- it does make a perfectly good (great, in my opinion) breakfast. Give it a try!