Cake of the Week: Orange Chocolate Bundt Cake

In celebration of finishing a rather epic math-y exam (blerg numbers and the letters that represent numbers!), my friends and I decided that a celebration of the cheese and chocolate variety was in order.

KatieHat was hosting this party — she convened the critical cheeses, baked some brie, and opened her apartment to all the exhausted students exiting the exam. Obviously I was in charge of the cake, as "Mollie-cake" has become a thing here at school (and we mean that entirely in the dessert and not drug sense).

I chose this Orange Chocolate Bundt Cake recipe because 1) it looked (and was) delicious; 2) the fruit makes it feel just a little bit springy hooray; and 2) it appeared to be reasonably transportable. It's very orange-y (4 oranges worth of zest and one o juice!), and I looove the dark chocolate chunks in the cake.

KatieHat lives a couple miles away, so after letting it cool out of the pan for about 30 minutes I popped it back in and wrapped it in a plastic bag, filled my backpack with ganache ingredients, hopped on my bike, and one-handedly steered my way to Medford with a cake tucked under my arm and my muscles screaming by the end (this is no angel food cake -- bundt cakes are dense!).

When I arrived I made the ganache. I made a traditional ganache (not the one in the original recipe), so it was just half heavy cream, half semi-sweet chocolate. Just a heads-up, it takes a while (like an hour) to cool to a drippy enough thickness.

Orange Chocolate Chunk Cake

Adapted from SmittenKitchen
Cake Ingredients: 

• 3/4 cups (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter at room temperature
• 2 cups sugar
• 4 eggs at room temperature
• 1/4 cup grated orange zest (from 4 large oranges)
• 3 cups all-purpose flour 
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
• 3/4 cup buttermilk at room temperature
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 2 cups semisweet chocolate chunks

Ganache Ingredients: 

• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 heaping cup semisweet chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour a 10-inch Bundt pan.
2. In a large bowl, use a mixer to cream the butter and sugar for about 5 minutes, or until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, then the orange zest.
3. Mix together 3 cups flour, the baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. In another bowl, combine the orange juice, buttermilk, and vanilla. Add the flour and buttermilk mixtures alternately to the creamed butter, beginning and ending with the flour. Fold in the chocolate chunks. 
4. Pour into the pan, smooth the top, and bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until a cake tester comes out clean. Let the cake cool in the pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a cooling rack.
5. For the ganache: heat the cream in the microwave or on a stovetop until hot but not boiling. Add in chocolate chips and let sit for 3 minutes. Stir until smooth. Let the ganache cool (you can do this in the fridge if you're in a hurry) until it's thick enough to not just run off the cake when you pour it. Drizzle ganache over the cake. I had some ganache left, so we put it on the table for people to add additional chocolate to their individual slices. 
6. Yum. 

Cake of the Week: Orange Milk Chocolate Halloween Cakeballs

This guest post is coming to you from Rachel in Ecuador. She used to live with me until she moved south...now she blogs at Watching for Wisdom. 

Happy Halloween!  In Ecuador, not very many people celebrate Halloween, and another minor holiday – something akin to flag day – also falls on October 31.  Various indigenous populations do participate in the ritual surrounding the holiday most Americans know of as Day of the Dead, dia de los muertos, but this has nothing to do with Halloween celebrations, clearly.  There were, however, numerous Halloween parties around the city at bars and clubs this weekend, since Halloween isn’t really a holiday that celebrates anything meaningful, and for adults if just a reason to dress up and drink.  And so, in accord with that tradition, two of my colleagues hosted a party.  Rather than bringing alcohol to the party, since I don’t drink, I decided to do a little baking – which is exponentially more labor intensive than buying beer, just for the record.

My baking adventure began with the brilliant vision of lemon cake balls, covered in white chocolate and decorated to look like eye balls – very Halloween-y.  However, as with most of my visions here, it was spoiled by the reality at the supermarket among other things.  The lemon cake I had planned to make called for sour cream, which is a rare imported commodity here in Ecuador and is only available at one of the major supermarket chains.  Knowing this, I purchased some last week because I expected that I would go to the other non-sour-cream-selling store to buy the rest of the ingredients this weekend. 

Keep in mind that going to the store here is not as simple as just getting in your car and driving half a mile.  I don’t have a car, so the store is a 5 min walk down to the nearest big street and then a 15 min bus ride or a 30 min walk.  And returning to the house requires that I climb back up the huge hill from the main street to my house, at 9,200 ft above sea level.  I went to my friends’ house to bakeg, but forgot the sour cream, and so upon going the store, I had to change plans and buy boxed cake mix, orange instead of lemon.  Thank you, Nestle.

The next setback my vision suffered was a problem of frosting.  I had hoped to buy premade frosting at the store, thinking I had seen some there before.  But, you guessed it, there was none to be found.  So why not just make my own?  After all, frosting is very simple, just butter and sugar.  Well, it turns out that confectioner’s sugar is actually a mixture of powdered white cane sugar and cornstarch, and the cornstarch is the critical ingredient that makes good frosting.  Here in Ecuador, one can find powdered sugar (azucar de polvo) but it is just that, powdered sugar… without cornstarch.  And what happens when there is no cornstarch?  The sugar dissolves into the butter/milk/cream cheese/whatever, and you get soupy frosting.  

So, I couldn’t find or make my own frosting.  However, I had a flash of inspiration standing there dejected looking at the shelving and decided I would use dulce de leche instead, which is very popular here. (Editor's note: did you know you can make your own dulce de leche???)

Finally, I was looking for white chocolate to coat my cake-eye balls, but all I could find was white chocolate bars with rice crispies so I had to buy milk chocolate instead.  Honestly, that was a bit of a relief because I’ve learned in the past that melted white chocolate is rather difficult to work with.  A little bit of internet research confirmed this and I learned that white chocolate contains more cocoa butter and butter fats than milk or dark chocolates, therefore melting takes more finesse because the fats melt at different temperatures.

One site recommended buying the best chocolate you can afford.  There is only one kind here: Nestle (probably no the highest quality), so that might have been problematic.  And so, by the end of my trip to the store, my white chocolate lemon cake ball vision was dashed, but I had a new plan: orange sponge cake with dulce de leche, coated in milk chocolate.

Cake balls are a relatively simple concept, but they require a lot of time.  First you bake the cake, which as you know, takes longer at this elevation, 9,200 ft.  Next, you break apart the cake and mix it with the frosting, or in my case, dulce de leche.  Once you’ve achieved a sticky, but not too sticky consistency, you roll the mixture into balls and chill for about an hour.  The final step is coating the balls in chocolate before chilling them for another hour until the chocolate is stiff. 

Editor's note: I've made red velvet, spice cake, and funfetti cake balls. All insanely good. Click on this link if for more on the step by step process. 

I underestimated the time all of this would take, and was late to my party.  Fortunately, everything happens late in Latin America (Editor's note: Rachel has interesting theories on this - read here), so although my friends and I arrived at 9 pm for an 8 o’clock party, we joined the five other guests, including the hostesses’ boyfriends to wait for others to appear.  

As for my baking, I was quite pleased with the result, given that no baking project here ever works out how it’s supposed to.  The cake balls were delicious, if incredibly sweet and rich.  And the accidental combination of flavors blended very nicely.  

Happy Halloween from Ecuador!

Cake of the Week: Orange Cake

Has anyone else noticed a pervasive air of misery recently? 

It may be because we’re at that wintery point, where the wonder has worn off and the cold is just dragging on. Or it may be the let-down at the end of the Olympics. Or perhaps the world is depressed about the fact that post-college, Spring Break no longer exists...Really, I don’t know the ultimate source - I just know that recently I haven’t been the bundle of joy, love, and sunshine that I usually am.

So what does the world (and me) need? A sunshine-colored sweet slice of happiness, perhaps?

I'm not a huge orange person (remember my last post? It doesn't go with peanut butter).

Mainly because when I was a kid, my mom put a baggie of orange slices in my lunch box every single day. And every single day, I tried desperately to trade them away. There were rarely any takers - how can orange slices compete with Gushers? Or Lunchables? Now that I'm older and wiser (yes, take a moment and laugh), I can appreciate oranges' sweet juicy goodness - most often at the end of a race. Those big boxes of orange slices you see for the competitors at the end of a 5K? OMG yes please!

But sometimes I prefer my orange slices in cake form.
I planned this cake a yoga class (meditation has never been my strong point). I was feeling the need for an opulent orb of orange goodness - and I have to say, I was more than impressed with the results!

I adapted the recipe from Baking Bites, but made just one small change. Instead of mixing in the eggs, I separated them and beat the egg whites to stiff peaks before folding them to the rest of the batter. This makes the cake lighter (I think. I would try it the original way and compare, but why mess with something so good!)

And the cake part of this cake is one of the BEST cakes I've made. No joke. I want to try this recipe with lemon, with grapefruit...with...well, that's all I can think of...feel free to share any other ideas!

The only "bad" part of this cake was the frosting. It was a disaster. Because the problem with oranges is that they're really sweet.

 (Well, that's not a problem, but in the context of frosting it can be). My frosting had orange juice and zest, but the ending result was a super-sugary-orange-flavored paste. Too much. I'm not even going to tell you about it.
So instead, I recommend you make a cream cheese frosting, with just a half-teaspoon of orange zest, and orange juice instead of vanilla.

Cake Ingredients:
3 cups all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups sugar
1 cup butter, softened
4 large eggs, room temperature
1 tbsp orange zest (about 2 oranges)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup milk (any kind)
1/2 cup orange juice (fresh, if possible)

1. Heat oven to 350F and lightly grease a 13×9-inch baking pan (pyrex or metal), or 2 9-inch round pans, or cupcake pans (the recipe yields about 32 small cupcakes).
2. Whisk together flour, baking powder and salt in medium bowl. Set aside.
3. In a large bowl, cream together sugar and butter until light and fluffy.
4. Separate the eggs. Add egg yolks to the butter and sugar.
5. Combine orange zest, vanilla, milk and orange juice in a measuring cup. Add flour mixture alternately with orange juice mixture to butter mixture in the large mixing bowl, beating well after each addition and ending with an addition of flour.6. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.7. Fold beaten egg whites into the rest of the batter.8. Pour batter into pans. Bake 13x9-inch cake 45 to 55 minutes, round cakes about 35 minutes, cupcakes about 20 minutes - or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool completely before frosting or freezing.

I made one 9-inch cake, which I cut in half to make a 2-layer cake. And then I made 16 cute little cupcakes to bring to work. 

So if you're looking for some way to perk up your day/week/life - make an Orange Cake and spread the slices of happiness!