Orange drizzle cake

I have serious cake tin envy at the moment - check out these tins at The Caked Crusader, Cherrapeno and Apple and Spice and you'll see what I mean. But I have a new toy of my own, in the shape of this rather lovely bundt tin. Well, it's sold as a Savarin mould, but I can't really discover the difference between the two words. Anyway, it's a cake tin with a funnel in the middle to create a hole once cooked. (When I explained this to T he said 'oh so it's a tin with a hole in it' - and I knew exactly what he meant, (nodding my agreement) but no, as J so rightly pointed out it's a tin with a funnel to create a cake with a hole in it!). Anyway, I was eager to use it, but a little afraid that the resulting cake would stick and refuse to turn out. As you can see below, my fears were groundless, although I did grease the tin very thoroughly with lots of butter, and put a couple of thin strips of baking parchment in it, to help with releasing it.

It seems that bundt cakes are rather more popular in the US than here in the UK, and I had trouble finding a printed recipe that gave me the volume of ingredients required and a cooking time for this type of tin, without being in cups, which I'm not very good at using. (It's partly that if I look at my bag of flour, I have no idea how many cups are left in it, but I can quickly pop it on the scales and find out if I need to buy more or not!). So anyway, I found my calculator and did a quick calculation to work out the area of the tin, taking the funnel into account and then decided I wanted quite a deep cake so decided on a 4 egg mixture. The cooking time was a guess too - I'd normally leave a 4 egg mixture for quite a while, but here there isn't a centre to be undercooked - a definite advantage!

Unwaxed oranges in the fridge decided the flavour of the cake for me, and since I enjoy Nigella's lemon syrup cake so much I wanted to use a syrup like that to add moisture to this cake too.

Orange drizzle cake

200g butter, softened

200g caster sugar

225g self raising flour

4 eggs

1tsp baking powder

zest of 1 large orange

For the syrup

Juice 1 large orange (about 4-5 tbsp)

100g icing sugar

Method

- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease a 26cm bundt tin very well with butter.

- Cream the butter and sugar together using an electric whisk until very light and creamy.

- Add the eggs one by one with a little of the flour if the mixture starts to curdle.

- Add the remaining flour, baking powder and orange zest and stir well to combine.

- Place on the middle shelf of the oven and bake for 40 minutes, checking first at 35 minutes.

- The cake is done when a skewer inserted comes out clean and the cake feels springy to the

touch.

- While the cake is baking, make the syrup. Heat the orange juice and icing sugar in a small saucepan to dissolve the sugar. I found this needed quite a high heat eventually before the sugar would dissolve.

- When the cake is done, stab holes all over it with a skewer and drizzle the syrup over the top. Allow to cool completely in the tin, as it will be slightly damp from the syrup.

- Turn out, serve and enjoy!!!

This was a very popular cake with all those who sampled it - one comment that made me smile at work was that it was among the best I have made! It was lovely and moist, although I think I would double the syrup ingredients next time, because it was such a large cake that it could have done with more.

Perfect as a breaktime cake, or enjoyed in some of the rare sunshine that made an appearance this weekend as I was enjoying the garden.