Blood cake and curd with sorbet

Blood Orange carnage

Gorgeous Blood Orange Juice

I’m not really sure what inspires me in the kitchen. It changes every day. Sometimes it changes hour to hour.  This time I’m pretty sure that the ingredients influenced the cooking. I cannot resist Meyer lemons. The beauty of blood oranges captivates me every time. So I ended up with quite a bounty of beautiful citrus from my visit to Central Market. Sorbet is the obvious choice for me when it comes to fruit because I have a wonderful ice cream maker and my darling husband loves to have sorbet.

Blood Orange Sorbet

Meyer Lemons

That’s rather mindlessly easy for me now: Meyer lemon sorbet, blood orange sorbet- Mix the juice with simple syrup and freeze it in your ice cream maker.

Meyer Lemon Sorbet

I was hoping to make something more exciting, something new.

Maybe something like Lemon curd.  The recipe for this came up when I was poking around on the Internet.  I love Pinterest.  I follow links on tastespotting also and find much inspiration there.  Nevertheless, lemon curd was completely new for me and very exciting! I love it! I made this lemon curd in my Vitamix. It was so easy. Instead of cooking it on the stove and stirring endlessly, I just let the Vitamix run on hot soup mode and measured the temperature with a thermometer while the machine did all the work. Nothing could be easier. The curd came together effortlessly.

Meyer Lemon Curd

The search for what to do with the blood oranges was not so easy. I kept finding recipes for blood orange oil cakes. Or olive oil cakes that used blood orange juice. These did not appeal to me. This one did. It was called Blood Orange Yogurt Cake. And it seems like a great recipe. Once I got into making the recipe I realized that it actually had a good bit of oil.The Blood Orange part- a syrup you pour on top and a drizzle of blood orange glaze. It came together easily- I prepared the cake as directed. (but I had to bake it a little longer than the recipe called for)
It’s incredibly moist and delicious thanks to the greek yogurt and oil. So moist though- I think I can cut the oil in half and still get a great cake. I will try that next time. I did pour the blood orange juice syrup on top of the warm cake. As you can see it didn’t penetrate very deep though it did seep in.

Blood Orange Yogurt Cake

Also, to note: I cut the cake in half before I glazed it simply because I did not like the pink color of the glaze. It looked a little like Pepto-Bismol! I made the coating but rather UNenthusiastically glazed half. HA! The sugar gave it a nice sweet flavor.  I will glaze the entire cake next time but I might use half regular orange juice and half blood orange juice to change the color.  It is delicious! (did I say that already?) I had a great time  creating with all of this fruit- now what to do with the lemon curd? Did someone say “Make some scones?” Hummm……

With Blood Orange Sugar Glaze