I bought my very first blood oranges this week. Yep – never ever have I had the opportunity to buy them before. Living in a remote town with only two supermarkets makes it very difficult to get your hands on certain ingredients. Seriously, if you get to go to a local farmer’s market every week to stock up on the best of the season’s produce you make me very very jealous. When I get to travel I am always looking out for local markets. I just love walking around, looking at all the beautiful produce. I get so excited I wish I could buy everything, but the reality is when you’re travelling what the heck are you going to do with a box full of fruit and vegetables? I was once so excited to find large heads of beautiful Romanesco broccoli piled up on a large table at a market in the hills of Perth. Have you ever seen one? It looks like a cauliflower, only bright green in colour, and it is a giant floral shape, made up of spiral buds that look almost architecturally placed. I bought one, even though I had no kitchen to do anything with it. I would have liked to chop it up and sauté in a bath of olive oil and garlic, maybe a sprinkling of parmesan at the end. But it ended up a soft, lifeless impulse buy that died in the bag I purchased in, left in a hotel bin.
Ok, so we don’t have markets up here in Port Hedland (plenty of iron ore and dust though) but we do have a local little company who are bringing fruit and vegetables from the farmers down south up here to us each week. It’s a great system. You can order a mixed box of goodies and you get a range of whatever is season AND you’re supporting local farmers! Along with the mixed boxes they offer things that you can’t find in the supermarkets. Like blood oranges! If you’re wondering why I am so thrilled at being able to get my hands on blood oranges I will explain.
Not only are blood oranges sweeter than normal oranges, they have an almost raspberry-like flavour. Originating from Sicily, they are the princess of all oranges, requiring great care and a perfect climate conditions to grow. Warm days and cold nights – the colder the nights the darker the flesh will be (and most prized). They are quite unique and very elusive as they have a very short season, August through to October in Australia. So being able to get my hands on some was quite a thrill.
So I ordered a bag of oranges (which ended up being way more than I needed – but that’s normal) and cut open my first EVER blood orange. These were not as dark as I expected, they were more a dark orange than the almost black ones I have seen on the internet, but wow were they full of flavour. You don’t get the citrus tang of a normal orange, these are mellow, with a berry-like taste that is quite difficult to describe. But you can only eat so many oranges so I decided to use the surplus to make an orange cake.
I’ve been making this orange cake for a long time now. It’s a favourite because it is just so easy. Unlike most whole range cake recipes, there’s no need to boil the orange first – you just chop it up and blitz it in the food processor along with all the other ingredients. There’s a tub of yoghurt in the mix, which not only gives a smooth texture, but adds a tang to the taste. Once baked, it is drenched in a thick orange syrup that takes it to the next level. Make sure you pour the syrup over the cake while it’s still hot so it absorbs all that flavour and adds to the moist texture.
If you can’t get your hands on blood oranges, any variety of orange will still result in a deliciously orangey cake that is hard to resist.
Whole Orange and Yoghurt Cake
Ingredients
Cake
1 orange
2 cups self raising flour
1 cup sugar
200g Greek-style yoghurt
2 eggs
Syrup
juice and zest of 2 large oranges
1/2 cup sugar
Method
Preheat your oven to 180 C. Line a 20cm round cake tin (or bundt tin as I have used in the pictures) with baking paper.
Roughly chop the orange and place into a food processor. Blitz until smooth, around 2 minutes, then add all the other cake ingredients and process until a smooth mixture forms. You may need to scrape down the sides of the bowl a couple of times during this process.
Pour into your prepared cake tin and bake for 30 minutes, or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.
Meanwhile, make the syrup. Pour the juice, rind and sugar into a small saucepan and stir over medium-high heat until sugar dissolves and mixture comes to a boil. Boil for 10 minutes, or until the mixture is thick and syrupy.
Invert cake from the tin and place onto a wire rack with a baking dish underneath to catch any excess syrup. While cake is still hot, pour over the syrup. Allow to sit as the cake absorbs the syrup and cools.
Serves 8
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