Seville oranges: I love their bitter, strong flavour, and bought some at the market without any clear idea about what to do with them. Then this month’s AlphaBake challenge letter was Y, and I love yoghurt in general and yoghurt cakes in particular. And I’ve longed to make Smitten Kitchen’s grapefruit yoghurt cake. And I love lemon curd…
So a whole lot of ideas came together. I’d make a Seville Orange curd, and turn the cake into little drop cookies, and sandwich them together with it. And I did, and they’re delicious. They look rather ordinary, but trust me: a lovely sharp orange flavour makes them light but distinctly moreish.
I used Seville oranges to make these: the sharp oranges we get in the UK for a few weeks in January. If you can’t get them, then you could substitute any sharp citrus: lemons, limes, or indeed grapefruit as in the Smitten Kitchen recipe. Sevilles don’t have much juice so I’d swap them one-for-one for lemons or limes; probably one decent juicy grapefruit has as much juice in it as four Sevilles.
To bake them, I used my Lakeland silicone macaron mats. I have yet to use these for macarons, but found my first one so handy for making chocolate drops that I bought a second one. These helped to keep the drop cookies to roughly the same shape. If you don’t have a macaron mat (and why would you?) then you could draw circles on one side of a piece of baking parchment, then flip it over and use it as a guide to create little drops. Or, to be more sensible, bake the mixture as fairy cakes, cupcakes, or in sandwich tins and turn it into a proper cake.
The drops are filled with Seville orange curd. That’s easy to make and delicious in its own right – even better than lemon curd. But if you don’t want to do two recipes, then the little drops (or the fairy cakes you’re more likely to make) are good to eat without the filling.