Satsuma Layer Cake

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satsuma layer cake, from above

So listen, should you ever find yourself in possession of 15 pounds of satsumas, say because of a killer sale last Friday at Whole Foods, a sale you’d been anticipating for days, Googling recipes and wondering about things like satsuma ice cream or satsuma salad or satsuma marmalade or jam, and you’d teamed up with your brother-in-law’s one box in order to bring your combined total up to three, knowing the store gives a fourth box free, and so you’d wandered out Friday night, box and box and box of tiny oranges in your cart, here is what you should do:

satsumas

To start, give some away. After all, it’s Christmastime, the season of celebrating what is the Greatest Gift, so why not extend the December 25 presents all month long? It will make you feel happy and joyful, in the same way that celebrating your first Christmas with your new husband tends to do, and, combined with your every-other-day Advent calendar and newly purchased Fraser fir and bright red pillows on the sofa, this small act of giving unexpected gifts, even little ones like boxes of oranges, will feel like this special tradition, this special Christmas memory between the two of you.

satsuma layer cake, baked cake layers
satsuma cake, layers on table

Then, with the box you have leftover, come home, set your oranges on the counter, and eat them, remembering how much you love their easy peels and sweet, sweet mandarin flavor. Have a satsuma when you get up in the morning or before bed at night. Take some in the car or in your lunch each day.

But before they’re all gone, and trust me, you’ll be glad you did this, save three or four and bake.

Bake this satsuma layer cake.

satsuma cake, up close

The idea for this cake came from a picture I saw on Flickr, one I cannot find today, of a tall cake, made up of three or four layers of white or yellow cake, sandwiched around thick, white frosting, with round rows of orange pieces all over the top. There was no recipe and no link for more info, but the image stuck with me: before we left for Whole Foods Friday night, I told Tim, I want to make a satsuma layer cake!

satsuma cake, finished cake in stand

So Saturday afternoon, while Tim was building a buffet for our living room, using that mental image of the satsuma cake I’d seen, I set to work: I took round layers of moist yellow cake, made for my first time with a blend of unusual ingredients like white spelt flour and olive oil and yogurt, and I layered them with a simple, thinned-out cream cheese frosting infused with satsuma zest. Individual pieces of satsumas decorated the middle layer, and neat, round rows of them piled up on top.

satsuma cake, on iPhone

When the cake was first finished, the layer with oranges looked like it had space between it, as if the fat slices of satsumas were holding up the cake. But within a few hours, everything cemented together, beautifully, perfectly, like a fancy bakery cake that was just the right sweetness and texture, with bursts of juicy orange in every bite.

We ate some Saturday night, after celebrating this Christmas month with a free showing of It’s a Wonderful Life put on by Nashville’s Wonderful Life Foundation, and Tim looked at me, and I kid you not, told me this was the best thing I’d made him in a while.

So if you don’t take my word on it, take his.

And then prepare to wish satsumas were on sale every week.

Satsuma Layer Cake
Makes one (3-layered, 9″) round cake

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
1/2 cup olive oil
3/4 cup Sucanat (alternate: brown sugar), ground in a food processor
3/4 cup palm sugar (alternate: white sugar), ground in a food processor
4 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 3/4 cups white spelt flour (alternate: all-purpose flour)
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1/2 cup yogurt
1/4 cup water

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour three 9″ round cake pans. (Confession: I still have my cake pans in Illinois, so I used two glass baking dishes that were round, and I sliced one cake in half horizontally to create three layers. Three cake pans would be ideal.)

In a large bowl, cream the butter, olive oil and sugars (i.e., Sucanat and palm sugar) together. Note that I ground my unprocessed sugars in a food processor ahead of time, just to get them a little more fine for the sake of the cake texture. Beat in the four eggs and vanilla.

In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt.

In a small bowl, combine milk, yogurt and water.

Add the flour mixture and the milk mixture alternately to the butter-sugar mix. Mix well. Pour batter into prepared pans.

Bake cakes for 30 to 40 minutes, until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool before slicing.

When ready, spread cream cheese frosting between layers, adding satsuma pieces to the second layer. Top the cake with satsumas all the way around.

Cream Cheese Frosting
I was eyballing the sugar, flour and milk here, so my amounts aren’t exact–however, that may still be helpful as you can adjust to your tastes. Oh, and don’t panic if the mixture starts to look a little like cottage cheese, by the way. Mine did, but it was delicious.

Ingredients:
8 ounces cream cheese
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
The zest of one satsuma orange
Organic powdered sugar, to taste
Milk, to desired consistency

Directions:
Combine ingredients in a bowl, adjusting sugar and milk until frosting is desired taste and consistency. You may also add a little water if you want to thin it out more.

Soft & Chewy Salted Caramel

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homemade caramel

Two years ago, I made my dad caramels for his birthday. They were hard and crunchy, like gold-wrapped Werther’s, the kind that would crack like glass when you bit them.

While I’d been after something a little more chewy that time, since that’s how Dad likes them most, it turned out candy-making could be something of an art, especially when you were new to it, so all I could muster were those smooth caramel stones, best for placing between your tongue and the roof of your mouth and slowly melting away. I gave them to him, presenting them proudly, and I put my candy thermometer away.

cooking caramel

But then this year, when Tim and I were up visiting a few months ago, talking to my dad in the kitchen about dinner plans or about something we’d baked, Dad, almost out of nowhere, asked if I’d thought about trying caramels again. Maybe soft and chewy this time? he’d asked, hopefully, like it would really mean something to him if I could.

caramels in pan

Now I know a lot of people would say their dad is great, the best, the guy they always looked up to, but my dad, who continually surprises me with his generosity and compassion and ability to think of other people more highly than himself, really is something special. And since he so rarely asks me to make him anything, I didn’t just want to make him these caramels—I had to.

Which meant it was time to revisit the art of candy-making.

caramels to cut

There’s a reason they call things an art, you know? The art of painting, the art of marriage, the art of caramels—you can’t just check some tasks off a list and expect genius. There’s some skill involved. Some creativity and some adjusting and some finding a rhythm. And usually, art isn’t easy.

For me, as if trying to make candy in the first place wasn’t challenge enough, I also wanted to do it with better ingredients: without corn syrup and without white sugar.

But while art isn’t easy, it is worth it.

caramels, wrapped

Because guess what? It worked.

It took three tries and two bonus trips to the grocery store, but last Wednesday night, while Tim and my brother-in-law and I drove up to Chicago for the holiday weekend, it was with more than thoughts of turkey and sweet potatoes and homemade cranberry sauce: It was with these soft and chewy salted caramels, created with sorghum syrup and sucanat, sitting in the back seat, individually wrapped and tucked inside a burlap-covered mason jar.

Happy birthday, Dad.

(He was worth it, too.)

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Sprouted Coconut Cocoa Banana Muffins

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sprouted coconut cocoa banana muffins up close

The first week Tim and I got back to Nashville, while we settled into a regular rhythm of making meals and paying bills and sharing a home office together, I began tackling the to-do list that follows a wedding. There were thank-you notes to write, bank accounts to merge, a pretty major name change to take care of—at the DMV, the social security office, with basically every account I have on record anywhere—and even looking back now, with it all done and finished and behind me, I can tell you there were definite low points (i.e., AT&T: Why is it so hard to get two existing users spun off into a new account? WHY?) and definite high points (i.e., these muffins).

baking muffins

I’ve always been the kind of girl to crave a couple hours alone in the kitchen. When I used to work a regular office job, I’d often come home at the end of the day, tired and not really wanting to go anywhere, and I’d comfort myself with cooking (eventually with my camera and you guys to join me, and thus this blog was born). Sometimes I’d play music or watch an online TV show in the background. Sometimes I’d talk to myself out loud. What mattered was the way it felt like downtime—cooking doesn’t always feel like that.

dark chocolate

If you talked to our friend Corri, for example, who came over for dinner last week, he could tell you what a different kind of cooking looks like. He could tell you about walking into a house and seeing both cooks still in the kitchen, green beans on the stove, chicken in the oven, flour all over the counters, and about hearing the sad, sad story of two back-to-back attempts to remake macarons and failing. At some point during our meal, I’m pretty sure I was apologizing to him for apologizing, that’s how bad things had gotten in my mind—and I do mean in my mind because the reality was our meal was perfectly good, thanks to that very capable man I married—but rather than loving my time in the kitchen and my contributions to what we were eating, I had been frustrated by it, by how my results weren’t matching my expectations.

baking banana muffins

I think that’s part of the difference between baking for leisure and baking for a purpose, and I think that’s what made these muffins such a highlight of our first week of Nashville married life.

muffins in the oven

There were a lot of things I was doing for a purpose that week: waiting for two hours at the DMV, mailing cards, sitting down with Tim to plan our monthly budget—but baking these muffins? That was different.

one sprouted coconut cocoa banana muffin

Because when you’re baking one morning in your pajamas while your husband works in the next room, you can talk to yourself, you can spill flour, you can burn something—you’ve freed yourself to. But when you bake for company or for a business or for the first time at a Thanksgiving dinner with all your family, you constrain yourself into thinking something must be how it must be and anything else is disaster. Or at least I do that.

buttered muffin

These muffins didn’t have to be anything special, just a way to use up ingredients and a way to relax for a few afternoon hours. Heaven knows, Tim and I would eat them regardless of how they ended up tasting. I found the original recipe online, where it came with high reviews, and I improvised ingredients with what we had (hello, huge sale on sprouted wheat flour at Whole Foods!) and ingredients I wanted to add.

muffins in cake stand

When I brought one to Tim, sliced and buttered and still steaming hot, it was just a happy bonus that we liked them—not too sweet, the perfect vehicle for a little jam or honey, yet chocolatey and cakey and a nice morning treat.

buttered muffins

And so it was these sprouted coconut cocoa banana muffins that, set beneath a glass bowl, first graced our dining room table, the dining room table that Tim built, and made our first week together in our first house feel a little more special, a little more right, a little more like home.

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