Retro Recipe Box - Orange Velvet Cake

I whipped up another one from the retro Recipe Box this afternoon. It's a Orange Velvet Cake. My mother assures me it's delicious and has been bugging me to make it (truth: asked me nicely once in an email)

It turned out really nicely. I thought the batter was a bit thick and strange when I made it, but it cooked up well.



This picture with the green icing is a bit off putting, but that's the 70's for you.

Here's the recipe:

6oz butter (stick and a half)
3/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon grated orange rind
1/2 cup milk
1 tablespoon orange juice (I just squeezed the juice of one orange and used that)
2 1/4 cups flour
3 teaspoons baking powder.

Cream butter with sugar and orange rind. Add eggs, one at a time, then orange juice; beat well. fold in sifted flour and baking powder alternately with the milk. Fill into buttered loaf pan, bake at 350F for 45 mins.

Allow to stand in pan 10 mins than turn out on to a cooling rack.

I put all the batter into one loaf pan,and it came nearly to the top and the cake rose up quite high, but you could get two cakes out of it, but they would not be as high.

Icing.

I made a chocolate icing for this cake, but the original recipe called for a butter icing made with 2oz of butter and then add confections sugar and beating until the right consistency for spreading. This is slightly vague for me, so I did the chocolate one this way:

1 tablespoon cocoa powder
1 cup less 1 tablespoon of confectioners sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons water

And then you could also do an orange flavoured glaze or lemon flavoured glaze:

1 cup confections sugar sifted
1 1/2 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice or lemon juice.

We had the cake after dinner and it was a bit crumbly for my liking, but the flavour was excellent. Next time I'd probably put in a little bit more milk and a little more orange juice to moisten it up a bit.

My Deviled Egg Boat is Sinking

As promised I'm going to share some of the fab recipes I found in the recipe box. Mmmmmmm, don't these all look enticing?

My personal favourite is the Deviled Egg Boats. Why on earth would you need to put the egg on a slice of toast? All these recipes are pre 1972 because they are in imperial measurements and in Australia we switched over to metric that year. I think that these recipes also look incredibly unappetising because of the photography and their reproduction on cheap magazine paper.

The recipe for the Deviled Egg Boats is 6 hard boiled eggs, 6 slices of bread, 80z of processed cheese shredded, 1/2 cup milk, 3 tablespoons mayo, 1/2 teaspoon mustard, 1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper. Once you've filled the eggs and toasted the bread "boats" , you have to make some kind of sauce with the milk and the processed cheese. Yum.

And I won't even go into the ingredients for the Layered Salmon Casserole, but if anyone is interested, please email me and I'll be happy to pass it along.

I did find one recipe for Coconut Slice which has a lot of promise. I'm going to make it with a few tweaks and then I'll post it.

Overly Ambitious?

I just got out my folder where I stash all the recipes that I take out of the newspaper or magazines, all the ones that I'm "definitely" going to try. hahahah. I'm never going to make even half of these, so I went through them this morning and most of the time I couldn't even remember why I cut out the page or kept the newspaper, so I just ditched all those, and the 10 almost identical recipes for some combination of lemon/blueberry muffins. Never even made one of those. I did keep one recipe for the muffins, and I'm going to make them today, although I only have raspberries not blueberries, so we'll see how they turn out

Unfortunately, I didn't even find a little bit of inspiration in all those lose papers flying around. I'm still stuck in the slump!!

My Favourite Recipe Books

I thought I'd share some of my favourite books that I've been using for the past couple of years. I also feel that these books have made me into a better cook, and really make me want to make everything from scratch.

Topping the list is Ina Garten, The Barefoot Contessa Herself. I have all five of her books and use them all the time. The best two are The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook and Barefoot Contessa Parties!. I use recipes from those books over and over again.


I've also recently fallen in love with the Everyday Food: Great Food Fast from the kitchens of Martha Stewart. It's fantastic. I also have a subscription to the magazine. I can hear the groans - not Martha, it's too hard - but this is Martha for dummies. All the recipes I have tried so far have turned out great and are really easy. I swore off Martha for a really long time after the great Buche de Noel debarcle of Christmas 2000. That thing took me about 13 hours to make and everyone 6 mins to eat. I was beside myself, used every pot, pan, bowl, spoon, knife and cutting board that I owned, and had a miserable 4 month old who cried the whole time I was making it. The cake itself was delicious, but I was so mad with Martha for about 4 years after that whole experience.

Nigella Lawson is another favourite. I have Domestic Goddess and Bites. I've very successfully made the Sour Cream Chocolate Cake and the New York Cheese Cake from Domestic Goddess and a few lovely dinners from Bites. Someone even wanted to pay me to make the Sour Cream Chocolate Cake when I made it for Mrs Names' Superbowl party this year!

I also just got Giada De Laurentis' Family Dinner - but I've only made one sauce out of it so far.

Incredible

I was going to say that it's incredible that Jessica Seinfeld's book Deceptively Delicious is still number 1 on the Amazon.Com bestseller list, but I just checked and it's actually down to #2, because some snore about emerging real estate markets is now #1. How fickle is the American public?

Anyway, my love affair with Deceptively Delicious started on a Friday and ended on a Sunday two days later. I was convinced that this book and these recipes were going to change my life - a bit like when they brought out the Swiffer (I've gone back to the broom).

It was all too difficult for no pay off really. The kids didn't really enjoy it, and it was so much work to puree all the vegies etc. I have chronicled my experience here and Mrs Names' fun times with it here.

The only positive thing that came out of it was that Marc took the left over Mac & Cheese to work and some people there loved it and wanted the recipe.

I have not re-opened that book at all. And it held so much nutritional promise!