After a not very successful attempt at orange chiffon cake here, I decided to use another recipe to have another go.
This time I went for Domestic Goddess Wannabe’s recipe. Her recipes had given me consistent results so far, and this one didn’t disappoint! I also added some cranberries to the cake.
The pan I used was a proper chiffon cake pan from Unopan, which is a sister company of San Neng 三能 , one of the best baking supplies manufacturers in Asia.
One thing I would change in the instructions is to add the orange zest only AFTER folding in the flour, because naturally the flour would stick to the zest, forming little flour beads. This means extra mixing is needed to break up the flour beads, and the extra mixing encourages gluten formation, resulting in less fluffy cake or even gluten streaks!
The cranberries were folded into the cake batter before the batter was poured into the cake pan, and they had mainly sunk to the bottom of the cake. This surprised me as I thought cranberries are light enough for the cake to support!
Next time, for the raisins to suspend evenly within the cake, the raisins will have to be manually added while carefully pouring the batter bit by bit, i.e. pour>raisins>pour>raisins and so on.
The taste though, was amazing! Orange flavour was strong, the cranberries complemented the flavour beautifully. The only thing I didn’t like about the cranberries was that they were too tough (relative to the chiffon cake) for a knife to cut through.
Therefore it’s very hard to get a clean slice of the cake if the cranberries happen to be along the blade line.
Other than that, this’s a very good cake!
bakexcitations! 