Hideaway food find - Orange Cream Cake

The Hubby found the coolest site/blog.  He knows how much I love food blogs and cooking so when he came across the Handwritten Recipes blog, it was a no-brainer to forward the information to his loving and adventurous wife. ^_^

This site is awesome.  The premise is a collection of handwritten recipes found tucked away in books.  Two of my favorite things combined!  Now all I need is a good luck dragon. <wink>  The site is fun to click through, not only for the recipes but for the cool books in which the recipes were found.  Very fun and very much a time-sucking black-hole for someone like me.  I immediately added the site to my RSS reader then spent a few hours poking around. 

Last week, a recipe rolled through that was perfect for book club, sounded adventurous and included ingredients I had on hand. Win, win, win. ^_^  I made the Orange Cream Cake by Mystery Chef with a little guess work and very few modifications.  Yum to the power of 3!

The original recipe went something like this:

Orange Cream Cake

1/4 c. butter or other
1 1/3 c sugar
3 eggs
1 1/2 c. sifted flour
3 t. baking powder
1/3 t. salt
2/3 c. milk
1 t. orange extract

Cream butter and sugar, beat egg yolks and add, sift flour B.P. and salt, add alternatively with milk, cut and fold in egg whites.

That was it.  No other instructions or comments.  But I thought, "It's a cake so how hard can it be?"  (Those of you who have seen my numerous cake fails can refrain from commenting here.)  Luckily, this cake was easy.  Below is the method I used:

Orange Cream Cake

1/4 c. butter
1 1/3 c sugar
3 eggs, separated
1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
3 t. baking powder
1/3 t. salt
2/3 c. milk
1 t. orange extract

• Grease a rectangular cake pan
• Preheat oven to 350 degrees F
• Cream butter and sugar
• Separate the eggs with yolks in one bowl and whites in another
• Beat egg yolks into the sugar/butter mixture
• Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt
• Mix the orange extract into the milk
• Alternate adding the flour mixture & milk mixture into the sugar/butter/egg mixture
• Fold in egg whites - I will definitely insert a "beat whites to a soft peak" step before folding in the future
• Pour into greased pan
• Bake at 350 F for 30-35 minutes or until top is golden and a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean

Don't ask me why I have orange extract - I have no idea why it's in my pantry.  (I also have peppermint, almond, rootbeer, and 2 different vanillas.  Maybe I have an extract problem.) O.o 

This time around, I served the cake sans icing.  It works well without icing and is almost a breakfast cake.  It isn't too dense and is very moist.  It goes wonderfully with coffee.  Next time (and there will be a next time), along with the egg white whipping step I'll add a vanilla frosting to see if I can get a dream-cicle taste.  Wish me luck!