Fanouropita

A spiced cake with no egg, butter or milk in it, where orange juice and bicarbonate do the lifting.

Vegan.

Ingredients

• 500 g plain flour
• 250 g caster sugar
• 200 ml olive oil
• 300 ml orange juice
• 100 ml brandy
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 150 g raisins
• 100 g walnuts, chopped
• zest of 1 orange
• icing sugar, to finish

Method

1. NO EGG, NO BUTTER, NO MILK, and the cake is built around that rather than apologising for it. The lift comes from bicarbonate meeting the acid in the orange juice, which is why those two must not be combined until the moment it goes in the oven -- the reaction starts immediately and is mostly spent within about five minutes.
2. SO THE OVEN IS HOT AND THE TIN IS READY BEFORE THE WET AND DRY MEET. Everything measured, the tin lined, the oven at temperature. Then they are combined, folded briefly, and it goes straight in.
3. AND IT IS BARELY MIXED. Thirty seconds of folding, until there is no dry flour showing and no longer. There is no egg or butter to carry a gluten structure, and a beaten batter here goes rubbery.
4. Raisins soaked in the brandy 30 minutes.
5. Oven to 175C and a 26 cm tin lined. This happens first.
6. Flour, baking powder, bicarbonate, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg whisked together thoroughly in a large bowl. An unevenly distributed bicarbonate gives a cake that rises on one side and tastes soapy in patches.
7. Walnuts and the drained raisins tossed through the dry mixture, which stops them sinking.
8. Sugar, oil, orange juice, zest and the brandy from the raisins whisked together in a separate bowl until the sugar has dissolved.
9. NOW: wet poured into dry and folded with a spatula for about 30 seconds, until just combined.
10. Straight into the tin and straight into the oven.
11. 40 to 45 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the top is deep brown.
12. Cooled in the tin 20 minutes, then turned out.
13. Dusted thickly with icing sugar. It keeps a week and is better on the second day, which is unusual for a cake with no fat but oil in it.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Greece · All recipes