Orange Butter Cake

 

No matter how varied our choices can get whenever we walk into any cake shop these days, I've not met anyone who doesn't like to go back to a few golden yellow pieces of home made butter cake every now and then. 

I can identify a few people amongst my family and friends who do not like chocolate cake but butter cake? Uh uhh. Not that I know of. 

A good butter cake - plain or citrusy, rich, soft and moist, never goes out of favor (and flavor!).

Ingredients for a butter cake are nothing out of the ordinary. They simply are the basic stuff like flour, eggs, milk (sometimes), vanilla extract for aroma and of course, butter.

Though it sounds simple, I've encountered a few less-than-perfect recipes before.

One recurring problem I had with a particular butter cake recipe written years ago in my recipe notebook and which I really, really like the taste of, was an excess of fat resting at the lower middle part of the cake after it was baked and has cooled down.

The result was an oily lower half of the cake. Other than that, the cake tasted perfect and so I continued making it a few more times even though I ended up discarding the middle bottom part of it.

At one phase, I even went on an online hunt for the perfect butter cake. One in particular came highly recommended in a blog. I tried it and for me it was just borderline good but not super as it was a bit dry.

Anyway, glad I won't be hunting no more now that I have tried this recipe. No oily part and hardly dry, this recipe meets my expectation on what a butter cake should be like - slightly salty aside from tender and fluffy in texture. Tastes great the next day.

 

Recipe by Amy Heng in Delicious Cakes by Y3K, a local publisher.

Ingredients:

250g salted butter
250g caster sugar
4 eggs
100ml fresh orange juice
1 tsp grated orange rind (use more if preferred)
250g self-raising flour
30g ground almond
1/2 tsp baking powder

Method:

1. Sieve together flour and baking powder, set aside.

2. Beat butter and sugar till light and fluffy.

3. Add in the eggs one at a time to the butter mixture, and beat until the batter is creamy and light.

4. Fold in flour and orange juice alternately until well-mixed. Lastly, add in rind.

5. Pour batter into a 9 inch lined round cake tin (or equivalent capacity square tin) and scatter some slivered almond on top if preferred. Bake at 160 deg C in a preheated oven for 60 minutes or until an inserted cake tester comes out clean.

Note: Do not open the oven for the first 30 minutes or the cake may not rise well.