Tangerine Custard Cake

"Hey remember that month when I only ate boxes of tangerines. So cheap and juicy!" - Regina Spektor

Good friends of ours, Craig and Kristen, have a very fruitful tangerine tree in their back yard. Their recent harvest saw in excess of 300 edible fruit, about 30 of which made it to my kitchen on the weekend. So what do you do when life throws you tangerines? Drink copious amounts of tangerine juice to ward of the winter cold demons, and then make a Tangerine Custard Cake.

I adapted this recipe from the Orange Custard Cake recipe in my ever-faithful Golden Circle copy of Cooking: a common sense guide. I used my food processor because....well why not? The original recipe called for more traditional techniques like rubbing butter into flour with fingertips, but with my barely-used new food processor sitting there staring at me, I had to give it a go.Here's the recipe as I made it this morning.

2 cups (250g) self-raising flour
1/3 cup (40g) custard powder
80g butter, chopped
1 cup (255g) caster sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp finely grated tangerine rind
1 cup (250ml) tangerine juice

Cream Cheese Icing
125g cream cheese, softened
3 tbsp icing sugar
2 tbsp tangerine juice

1. Preheat fan forced oven to 180C. Line a cake tin with baking paper (I used a 20cm x 20cm square tin but if I owned a bundt tin I definitely would have used that.
2. Sift flour and custard powder into the large bucket of a food processor. Add chopped butter and process until the mixture resembles fine bread crumbs.
3. Add the eggs, tangerine juice and rind and process on low speed until smooth.
4. Pour/scrape batter into cake tin and bake for 35 mins or until a skewer comes out just clean (keep an eye on it in the last 10 minutes to avoid over-cooking).
5. When the cake is completely cook, mix together the cream cheese, icing sugar and 2 tbsp of tangerine juice. The quantities may be a bit out, I just kept adding a bit more icing sugar and a bit more juice until I liked the taste. Spread icing over the top of the cake.

The tangerine juice makes this cake lovely and moist (providing you don't over-cook it), and the custard powder seems to give it a silky texture. 

If anyone has any tried and tested tangerine recipes, please pass them on. Now that I'm starting to feel a little more human as I bid the first trimester farewell, my appetite is encompassing things other than hot chips and Ribena. Hopefully my kitchen will start getting a bit more love and attention, and my family a more interesting range of dishes.