Directions: |
Directions:CREAM SHORTENING and sugar, add egg and grated rind. Add milk and flour alternately, saving a little flour (¼ cup) AND add with the fruit and nuts lastly. When all mixed completely STIR IN SODA WATER. Pour in greased and floured tube pan (small angel food pan works great). BAKE in oven 325* for about one hour.
JUST AFTER cake comes from oven, boil to a syrup the juice from the orange and pulp and ½ Cup sugar. Pour this warm syrup over cake and work the syrup down the sides and middle by wiggling the pan thus allowing juice to soak down into cake. Let stand in pan on rack until cool. Then carefully turn upside down and remove cake from pan, careful to revert so cake is upright.
Grandma Dorothy Harris made this cake often for my father and so her tube cake pan became very bent and wobbly (the tube part) as she was trying to ease the syrup down the pan sides to make cake gooey. |
Personal
Notes: |
Personal
Notes: This recipe comes from my dad’s mother, Sarah Elizabeth Harris. When my dad would put my brother and I to bed at night, he would tell us stories of when he was young in San Antonio, Texas. At the time, I believed every word he said. I loved those stories and in my mind, he brought my grandparents and great-grandparents alive! I never met any of them, but dad’s stories made me believe I knew their personalities, their voices (he mimicked them for us) the color of their hair, and my grandpa Tom’s rolling gate. My grandpa was a ragman/tin man. He drove a wagon, buying and selling old tin ware, pots, pans and rags. My dad remembered going out with the horse and wagon gathering fallen cracked, pecans, from the pecan orchards along the San Antonio River banks. He said they would walk picking up the culls and cracked pieces of nuts. He said it was hard work, at least to a young boy about 5-6 it would be considered hard work. His dad would tell him stories and sometimes they would make up songs to sing. At the General Store in town, my grandmother would buy the hard, dried dates that were at the bottom of the wooden box. Everyone had picked over these and they were the leftover. My dad said his mother told him that the dried hard dates were just perfect for this recipe. His mother would buy one orange, and everyone could enjoy the treat in the form of this cake. That one orange was a luxury. (I did a google search and found this recipe in some form going back to the mid 1800’s)
But this is the recipe given to my mom by dad’s sisters, Katherine and Eula when they married in 1940. As a child I don’t remember Christmas without this cake, but somewhere in time I quite making it. My family was more ”Christmas Pie People”. But I really enjoy this cake and it does bring back memories.
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This recipe for GRANDMA SARAH HARRIS' ORANGE CAKE is from