French Orange Cake: or, Getting continental with raisins

I'm a sucker for recipes that drop the word "French" in the title.

French Orange Cake Grated rind of 1 orange 1 cup sugar ⅓ cup shortening 1 tsp baking soda 1 tsp baking powder pinch salt 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla 1 cup sour cream* 2 cups sifted flour 1 cup chopped raisins        Topping: Juice of 1 orange ½ cup sugar Whipped cream for serving (optional) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9" square pan. Rub together the orange rind and sugar until the sugar is a bright yellow and smells strongly or oranges. Cream together the sugar, shortening, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Add the egg and vanilla, and beat until very light. Add about one third of the flour. When mixed, add about half of the sour cream. Repeat this with another third of the flour and the remaining half of the sour cream. Then mix in the last third of the flour. When all is combined, stir in the raisins. Bake for 25 minutes, or until a toothpick in the center comes out clean. While the cake is baking, make the topping. Mix the sugar and the orange juice, and then heat until the sugar dissolves. You can either do this in a small saucepan over medium-low heat, or you can use the microwave by cooking it for 15 seconds at a time, stopping the microwave and stirring the juice after each time. As the juice gets hot, watch carefully so it doesn't boil over. As soon as the cake comes out of the oven, pour the syrup on it. Allow to cool, or serve it warm. If desired, serve with whipped cream. *or sour milk, or buttermilk Mrs. John E. Meeter, 239 College Ave, Chambersburg Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, September 13 1935, page 12

Mrs. John E. Meeter starts off strong. We're only a minute or two into the recipe, and we already have oranges and sour cream.

Because this recipe makes a lot of cake, I halved it. This entailed splitting an egg in half, which has become a surprisingly undaunting task after doing it enough times. I'm not complaining about the egg-splitting. I only point it out so I can note that the orange rind had turned the sugar such a beautiful color that the bright yellow egg looked like a hideous beige spill on top of it.

Our finished cake batter was thick enough to suspend in the beaters.

When the batter landed in the pan, it looked a lot like 1234 cake.

You may have noticed that the recipe calls for raisins, and our cake batter doesn't contain any. The raisins, predictably enough, incited an ideological split in the house. Some people really didn't want those creepy crawly brown things in the cake. I, on the other hand, wanted to see if they improved the cake at all. After all, Mrs. Meeter put raisins into the cake, and she got her name and recipe in the newspaper and a $2 basket of groceries. Maybe the raisins make the cake French.

And so, after putting half the cake batter into the pan, I did this to what remained:

I didn't realize that the raisins would add volume to the cake batter. So, I ended up beraisining half the batter but therefore two-thirds of the cake.

With the cake in the oven, it was time for the topping. Mrs. Meeter would have dissolved the sugar and orange juice in a tiny pot on the stovetop (perhaps by setting it over the stove's pilot light), but we can use a microwave instead.

Our resulting glaze looked just like that syrup in canned peaches with a bit of extra yellow food coloring in it. For the record, I didn't add any dyes to the cake or the glaze. Oranges produce a really pretty shade of yellow on their own.

Getting back to the cake itself, I thought it would level itself off in the oven. It did not.

Looks like a child's modeling clay project, doesn't it?

The glaze highlighted every finger-smudged contour of the cake and made it look worse. It's very rare for a glaze to make a cake look bad, but we succeeded today.

As is often the case with cake, it looked better after cutting. The visual shortcomings all but disappeared. However, some people thought the intrusive raisins cancelled out any aesthetic improvements.

Raisins or not, everyone really liked the cake. The orange glaze added beauty to perfection. Seriously, I would save the glaze recipe even if I didn't make the cake again.

Bizarrely, you couldn't tell the raisins were there. You couldn't taste them, they didn't change the texture, they didn't even add little pockets of moistness. It appears the power of oranges can defeat raisins. So unless you're trying to sneak raisins into everyone's food like a parent slipping pulverized broccoli into lasagna, you can omit them and lose nothing. Maybe Mrs. Meeter knew the raisins wouldn't alter the cake at all, and that's why she added them. After volumizing the cake with imperceptible raisins, there's more cake for your hungry children, your spouse who just got home from a factory job, a few unexpected guests who followed your progeny home, and yourself. You might even have an extra slice to pack into your husband's lunch the next day.

Raisin-based economizing aside, this is a really good cake. It turns out that using actual oranges to make orange-flavored things is delicious.