Orange time

I love the look of oranges as they ripen on the tree. The beautiful orange colour contrasts so well with the glossy dark green leaves. They look so lovely I don't like to pick them and wish the tree would look like this all year. However, pick I must if I want to enjoy the delicious fruit.

When I had squeezed enough fruit to almost fill a jug with juice, I looked around to find other ways to use them and found this recipe for orange cake. It uses only one orange so it hardly helps to reduce the plentiful harvest, but I am sharing it here as it has to be the quickest and easiest cake I have ever made (and it tastes good too).

Whole orange cake
1 orange, washed and quartered
3 eggs
180 g butter, melted
1 cup white sugar
1 1/2 cups self-raising flour

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C and grease large loaf tin. Put the orange quarters into the food processor and process until they're completely broken down. Add the rest of the ingredients and process again for about 30 seconds, or until everything is mixed together. Scrape the batter into the tin and bake for aound 40 minutes or until the cake is golden.

This recipe comes from a wonderful book  called "down to earth - a guide to simple living" by Rhonda Hetzel. The book has inspired me to make much more than orange cakes and I hope to share more of that in future posts.