Notes: For the first night of Passover, I was looking for a dessert I hadn't made in previous years such as the chocolate orange cake or the flourless chocolate-orange almond cake. My mother-in-law highly recommended this cookbook and it's there that I found this Claudia Roden recipe. The attribution says it's adapted from her cookbook, The Book of Jewish Food. It seems to be a pretty popular recipe online but even this link (from the New York Times), is a version that includes orange blossom water and baking powder, two ingredients missing from the recipe I used.
Anyway, I tried using blood oranges, hoping for a colour like the icing on the orange glazed donuts at Dough in Brooklyn. Boiling the oranges is the lengthiest step but requires no work. Because the recipe only calls for two oranges, it's hard to gauge the amount of liquid that will be in the final batter. I imagine you could add a few tablespoons of matzoh cake meal if it looks too wet.
The baked cake was quite moist and dense and had an intense citrus flavour. It reminded me of one of my favourite muffins. Not too bad, but I prefer a slightly drier cake.
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