Heavenly Cake - "True" Orange Genoise (Two versions)

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Have care. The first part of this post is a little dated as I was really excited and made this early. :)

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This is take 1 as I am definitely going to make this again with the real seville oranges!! This version was so good I may try this one again too.

I used this mixture of twice: 2 juice oranges, 1 meyer lemon and 2 blood oranges; both for the syrup and for the orange curd.

I went to Fairway

 in Red Hook, NY to look for the Seville oranges. It was too early but they do have such lovely produce!

From Fairway's parking lot you can see Lady Liberty. Perhaps you can make out her shape right in the middle of this picture.

See how lovely and yellow the meyer lemons are in comparison to the regular? The are supposed to be a bit sweeter.

I added a little of this Italian volcano to the mixture. My body craves this stuff. However, at over 6 bucks a pop and only in season a short while I go into serious withdrawal rather quickly...

I did this over 3 days. the first day, the syrup and curd. The second day, the ganache and the third day the cake.

The finished syrup.

I boiled down the mixture for the substitute curd as Rose recommends (even though it is for juice oranges.)

My only mistake was thickening the curd too much. I had to stretch it out with my hands like play-dough to  cover the middle of the cake. I have now made curd a few time and have discovered that you can make great ice cream with lemon or orange curd.

Our food processer is the only appliance in our kitchen that is strictly parve (not meat or dairy.) I pulsed the (parve) chocolate and then transferred it to a small dairy bowl to pour in the hot cream. This worked quite nicely and with just a little mixing the chocolate melted right away. The 70% Scharffenberger's I used was very intense and competed with the orange flavor. Next time I will use 60% as Rose recomends. I now use this method to make hot-chocolate. You do not even need to pulse it fine you just break it into a couple pieces, put it into a sealed coffee cup with hot water or milk and give it a good shake for a minute or too. Intense!

Voila. While this may have taken three days to make it took less then 24 hours to consume. Wow! What a winner! :)

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Ok. After all of the above came out so good I could not resist making it again when I finally found seville oranges.

Real Seville oranges. Version 2:

The seville orange curd. The first version I cooked the curd to long and it was too thick. This time it came out better. Is it just me or does the middle-white part of the seville orange, when eaten straight, tast just like butter? No wonder Rose like these! :)

I do not have a dairy mixer so I simply mixed the genoise in the double boiler pot using the hand mixer. I did not get the full two inch genoise though. I think I folded in the flour too vigorously though, as I noticed the batter deflate somewhat from it.

The genoise seems a perfect cake for the toaster as the top gets cut off anyways so you can keep the top closer to to the heating element the whole time without having to move the cake up or down in the middle or cover it. While the top got darkened, the bottom was perfect.

Voila! It really was wonderfull and orange-y. Truly lovely and intense. Thank you Rose! The first, blood orange, version was very good though and had a unique flavor. I think I will experiment with versions of this in the future. Maybe a grapefruit or clementine version...