Recipe #5: Orange Juice Pudding Cake

Okay, kids. You’ve had your dessert, dessert, dessert, and meat course. Now it’s time for dessert.

In this case, it is a disarmingly simple cake – akin in its light texture to pound cake, like unto tres leches cake in its oozing moistness, and reminiscent of a glazed donut in its aroma.

Lest you think this is some sort of Frankencake, I assure you it is more integrated than that. It really is quite simple. I can describe this generally as a mild lemon cake topped with a sugar/orange flavoring.

The ingredients are nothing unusual.

What it takes to bake

(Though, I was a bit stumped by the recipe’s calling for “Crisco oil” – was that to mean the smeary Crisco stuff in a can? Probably not, as other recipes in the book call for just “Crisco”, which seems apt for those dishes. And which boxed cake mix ever calls for the canned shortening? So, wanting to be true to Carol Paul’s recipe, I splurged the extra dollar on Crisco brand “Pure Vegetable Oil”. [And what did I get for the money? Soybean oil. That’s it – that’s the only thing listed in the ingredients. Other brands of “vegetable oil” were like this too; why? There is nothing wrong with soybean oil, not even in the American public’s mind. Why don’t the producers label the stuff as soybean oil on the front of the package as well as on the back?] After making the cake I can honestly estimate that any soybean oil would have worked as well. So why call for “Crisco oil” specifically? One clue might be found in the fine print on the back of the bottle: “MANUFACTURED BY: […] THE J.M. SMUCKER COMPANY  ORRVILLE, OH”… and a cynic could appropriately suppose Mrs. Paul is ingratiating her candidate husband with the good people of the “important swing state” [as the news reports invariably describe it] of Ohio. My final judgment is: If you don’t have a stake in electoral politics, any soybean oil will do.)

Mix up the appropriate cake stuff, and get an appropriate batter.

Batter up

Bake the cake until, as the recipe puts it, “the middle does not jiggle.” I pride myself on being a good judge of jiggle, so I left the cake in the oven a few minutes more than the time the recipe otherwise suggested. Maybe a few too many minutes more, as the cake got to browning at the edges and was pulling away from the sides of the pan – but ultimately this might have worked out for the better, as we shall soon see.

The recipe next instructs to prick the cake with a fork all over the top.

Stick a fork in it. The recipe said so!

This is to prepare it for the deluge of topping.

Some thin glaze

The topping is very thin. It is a mixture of orange juice, melted butter, milk (or water, the recipe states it’s your choice; water!) with confectioner’s sugar dissolved in. This isn’t a glaze so much as a liquid. “NOW! MORE MOIST!” the screaming blurbs on the cake mix boxes are apt to proclaim… but you want moist? Pour this over a newly-baked cake and you’ll get it dripping moist.

Slosh

It doesn’t stay on top of the cake – actually, it does at first, but only until it gets all absorbed into the cake within a few minutes. And then the cake is moist through and through.

That’s more reasonable!

Had I not overbaked the cake a little bit, I can only imagine what the moisture level would have been after this step. Since the cake got a liquidy topping deluge, it turned out to be pretty forgiving that I had left the cake in the oven a minute or two too long.

I really had trepidation after this step, at first, as at this point the cake’s main scent was an overpowering butter smell. But this soon mellowed to a sweet, light smell reminiscent of nothing so much as a glazed donut. Not unpleasant!

You don’t have to use a spoon

But the cake itself tasted more compelling, with a lemon flavor that was satisfying but light enough to be subtle. The orange juice in the glaze might have added an additional fruity flavor, but I suspect it was mostly there for the tangy sweetness. It all worked well together, and you can’t top this cake for moistness. My family all gave it positive reviews and ate it regularly. This is a dessert that pleases and not overwhelms.

Lesson learned: You want a moist cake? Pour liquid over it.

Rating: Nine out of ten sopping crumbs

Recipe #4: Sherry’s Easy Brisket

Finally, some real food. Quasi-Libertarians do not live by dessert alone, and the rest of us shouldn’t either.

What else could it be but an entrée? One made from a big hunk of beef, and you can’t get more stereotypically American than that.

You also can’t get more American than the convenience that is at the heart of this recipe. The soup mix and salad dressing manufacturers of this world did all the preparing and combining of the flavorings, so you don’t have to!

Somebody said it would be easy

Not that I’m complaining. I’m not above convenience cooking. I’m all for anything that makes preparations for cooking a three-and-a-half-pound chunk of meat easier.

So easy it was, to combine all the pre-prepared flavorings and pour them over the uncooked meat,

Red and raw

and then put the whole covered deal into a 250° oven to cook for hours on end.

Later that day

I actually like this pace of cooking, getting something going and forgetting about it for three or four hours. It turns out that this is best for cooking brisket – “low and slow” is the term – but I perhaps could have left it to cook longer, as the meat didn’t come out as tender as brisket should be.

Edible, though

Or so I was told. Remember, I’m a vegetarian, so this dish wouldn’t have appealed to me anyway. But the rest of my family loved it, fairly gobbled it about all up. The flavor was reported to have been very, very good (in fact my wife has been beseeching me to make this again), and I’m willing to give the recipe the benefit of the doubt and take personal blame for the less-than-ideal texture of the meat. If even a vegetarian of near thirty years standing can make this dish come out compelling enough, well, it must be easy indeed.

Lesson learned: Big chunks of meat are not as revolting if you don’t think about them so much

Rating: Nine out of ten dead animals