After two days without overhead lights due to tripping them and being rather perplexed by the old fashioned fuse box (note to landlords: please stop lumping students with crappy goods), I finally figured out how to get everything back on, and lo, let there be light! To celebrate being able to cook by more than candle light, I made myself a cake. It had been a cake nestled in my mind after reading about the Arabic way of serving coffee- with orange water and cardamom- and about the cake one can make inspired by this, a recipe I’ve now lost. The below is basically a rejigged sponge cake. I’ve tried so many sponge cake recipes and the one below has been the best. Fills one sandwich tin.
Ingredients
2 eggs cracked, weighed, and whisked.
Then use the following in the same weight as the eggs –
Self-raising flour, sifted (I had none, so used plain, apparently it’s a teaspoon of baking powder per 110g of plain flour to convert it)
Softened butter or margarine
Sugar
Then –
1 and a half tsp baking powder
2 tbsp strong coffee
4 cardamom pod contents ground up good
For the icing –
Full fat cream cheese
More coffee
Caster Sugar
- Preheat to around 160 degrees (non-fan).
- Cream the butter and sugar
- Add a little whisked egg with a tablespoon of flour, and mix. Repeat until the egg is gone.
- Fold in the rest of the flour, along with the coffee and cardamom.
- If it splits, just give it a quick beat (oi oi!).
- Put in the oven for half an hour or until a knife poked in the middle comes out clean.
- Remove when done and allow to cool (definitely allow to cool or the icing won’t work).
- For the icing, mix all the icing bits together. The amounts depend upon how luxurious you want it, but I generally use a whole pack of cheese and add the sugar to taste. You can add a bit of orange water in here, or a little orange juice, but I had neither so didn’t. I expect it’d be lovely!
