A Day of Firsts!

It has been a day of firsts here in the kitchen of A Boston Food Diary! I am very excited to host Christmas Eve dinner this year, and I really want to make it a delicious affair. Most of tomorrows menu I can make tomorrow, but I decided to make a cake that I could throw together today, and serve tomorrow. "Throw together" would be the key term on this one.





The recipe I found (courtesy of the Greyston Bakery-I love those guys) included a couple techniques that I just haven't worked with before. The first was boiling oranges. Have you ever boiled an orange before? It was actually sort of cool to watch. The bright orange spheres bobbed along in the water, rotating in the bubbling water, and as the skin became more supple, the bright red juice from the blood orange bled into it creating a beautiful marble affect. It was honestly rather cool.







Next step was to cut the oranges into pieces and purée them. Um awesome. The skin had become so supple that the purée was smooth and wonderful. The smell of pure orange brought me right back to the soccer fields when I was young and orange slices were readily available during half time. Who knew what delights could come from pureeing an orange?





Later I had my first experience with beating egg whites into firm peaks, and then folding them into the rest of the cake batter. Two things- the beating part took a lot longer than I thought it would. It seemed to take forever for the bubbly stage to dissipate and the liquid form into a more liquid state and then start to thicken and then finally stiffen. Second note, it was oddly harder than I thought to fold the whites into the mix. I'm hoping I got them completely folded in. Of course the good part is that the point of adding egg whites is to add air to the mix, so the beautiful part was watching the cake batter "fluff" up as the whites elevated it.





The cakes are currently cooling-recipe and post eating thoughts once I have indulged in what smells like an amazing cake!