Friday favourites

Orange cake (butter sponge)
This is a lovely light, fine-grained cake. It's not a real sponge cake (I'm not very good at those) but it's easy to make, especially if you have an electric beater. A hand beater will do the job, just takes a bit more muscle power.
Preheat oven to 180C, grease and paper a 20cm round or square pan.

Ingredients
3/4 cup sugar
1 cup SR flour
3 eggs
3 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons melted butter
grated rind of 1 orange
Method
Mix sugar and sifted flour in a basin, add eggs, then milk, orange rind, and lastly melted butter. Beat well for 3 minutes (mixture should get lighter in colour) Bake for 20-25 minutes. Allow to cool for 5 minutes, turn out onto a wire cooler.
Orange icing
Icing sugar, 1 tsp butter, rind and juice of  1 orange. Mandarin segments make a nice decoration.

Variations 
1. flavour with 1 tsp vanilla essence, ice with chocolate icing, sprinkle with coconut.
2. Spice cake - add 2 tsps cocoa, 1/2 tsp cinnamon. 1/2 tsp nutmeg (sifted with flour).
3. Add one or two passionfruit to cake mixture, and also to the icing.


You can also split the cake (slice it horizontally) and fill with whipped cream.
When I had lots of people to feed, I used to make double the quantity, and bake it in a baking dish (roasting pan).