This is orange syrup pound cake recipe isn’t mine – let’s get that out of the way! Nope, not mine, it’s from NZ Masterchef judge Ray McVinnie and it’s a recipe I’ve made regularly for close to 15 years. It’s a proper ‘grown ups’ cake, although a 13 month old came for lunch recently and he scoffed it. So I guess it’s really a cake for all ages!
Ray’s base recipe uses lemons, but my orange tree is still going bananas, so I substituted the lemons for oranges and in the syrup I reduced the sugar content as the orange juice brings additional sweetness. I’ve made this using limes too: YUM. I wrote a post a recipe a few months back that was quite similar to this one (I guess I like oranges!) but this recipe is much simpler and quicker, especially if you are lucky enough to own a cake mixer. Katie (My-Kitchen-Aid-Cake-Mixer) does a beautiful job of this for me, it’s a doddle and the cake itself only takes about 6 minutes to make. Besides, you’ve gotta love a cake that has batter requiring five ingredients (keeps the purists happy).
The cake…
Ingredients
- 200g butter
- 350g sugar (ideally castor, but normal works well enough!)
- Finely grated zest 2 oranges (or lemons/limes)
- 5 eggs
- 250g plain flour
- 300g sugar (if you use lemons or limes - use 400g sugar)
- 250ml water
- Grated zest of 1 orange (or lemon/lime)
- Juice of 3 oranges (or lemons/ limes)
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Instructions
- Preheat oven to 180 degrees (normal bake).
- Butter a 20cm diameter loose bottomed cake tin and line bottom with greaseproof/baking paper.
- Cream the butter, castor sugar and citrus zest with vigorous beating until pale and fluffy (use a beater or, ideally a cake mixer).
- Beat in the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in the flour until well mixed, but do not beat.
- Pour mixture into greased cake tin and bake for 45 mins to 1 hour, or until a bamboo skewer comes out clean.
- Remove cake from tin and let cool. If you like you can leave the cake like this, forgo the syrup (and save your teeth!) and dust with icing sugar.
- Put the sugar, water, citrus zest and juice into a saucepan and bring to boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Boil for 2 mins. Remove from the heat. You have two options for the syrup:
- ONE: Follow Ray's original recipe and pour all the syrup over the cool cake so the cake soaks it all up (you'll want to put the cake in a deep dish)
- TWO: Or you can do what I like to do - pour half the syrup over the cake and let it soak up and keep the other half of the syrup to serve with the cake.
- Either way - serve the cake with cream or Greek yogurt (I only had special addition Meadow Fresh Custard and Rhubarb yoghurt when I made this - it was a beautiful accompaniment!)
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Pat Gurski