It’s rare for us to make cakes the traditional way any more; creaming together butter and sugar, beating in the eggs and folding in the dry ingredients by hand is not only time-consuming but tiring on the arms too. Instead, for the last several years we’ve mixed most cake batters directly in our food processor, which has a permanent home on the kitchen work surface.
The ingredients are tipped into the bowl, sometimes all together as in my favourite banana cake recipe, sometimes in two or three batches. The blade is very sharp so a few seconds blending is usually all it takes to bring everything together into a batter. Sometimes we need to remove the lid and scrape the sides down once, before a final quick pulse to finish.
The batter is then poured or spooned straight into the cake tin(s) and baked.
Easy peasy and very quick!
Challenged to create a few Brazilian recipes that make good use of my new Magimix 4200 XL, Pete and I made these tasty individual orange and lime cakes, more commonly made as a single larger cake. My previous post was an equally easy recipe for Brazilian Brigadeiro Chocolate Bonbons. For the basic cake batter recipe, we used a recipe by Marian Blazes, an American who has lived and travelled extensively in South America. As it was such a success for the Marzipan Cakes we made over Easter, we made individual cakes rather than one big one, and skipped the glaze altogether.
These are delightful little cakes with a refreshing and vibrant hit of citrus and, as Marian has found, very versatile – you could serve them for breakfast, elevenses, as a packed lunch treat or for afternoon tea.
Usually known as bolo de laranja, orange cake is apparently a popular cake in Brazil. I really like Marian’s combination of orange and lime, and wanted to reflect the use of two citrus fruits in the name. My friend Rosana helped me with translations.
Little Orange & Lime Cakes from Brazil | Bolinhos de Laranja e Limão
Ingredients
- 2 oranges
- 1 lime
- 3 large eggs
- 60 ml vegetable oil
- 125 g butter , melted
- 300 g plain white flour
- 100 g ground almonds
- 350 g sugar
- 1 ½ tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp salt
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 180 °C (fan).
- Liberally butter your muffin tins and then sprinkle a little flour over the buttered surfaces.
- Zest the lime and the oranges.
- Peel and section the orange, discarding the skin, pitch and membranes between segments. (You could candy the peel if you wish).
- Juice the lime.
- Place zest, orange flesh and lime juice into the food processor bowl and blend briefly until smooth.
- Add the eggs, vegetable oil and melted butter to the processor and blend again until well mixed.
- Add the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and ground almonds to the processor and blend until the batter is smooth. Pause to scrape down the sides of the bowl and blend again briefly, if necessary.
- Spoon or pour the batter into the prepared muffin tins.
- Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, depending on the size of your muffin tins. The smaller cakes took 25 minutes, the larger ones needed another 5 minutes.
- Test using a skewer (it should come out clean) or press the surface lightly (it should spring back).
- When nicely risen, golden brown on top and cooked through, remove from the oven and leave to cool for several minutes in the tins.
- Remove from the tins and allow to cool fully on a wire rack.
Whatever time of day you choose to eat these bright little cakes, I hope you enjoy them!
Our new Magimix 4200 XL is very similar to our older 5200 – the key differences for us are the XL, which denotes the extra wide feed tube, and a slightly smaller footprint. The 4200 XL also comes with a BlenderMix attachment for smoothies and batters, which we’ve yet to try. Like the 5200, it comes with large, medium and mini bowls, a very sharp blade, an egg whisk attachment, a dough hook attachment and a couple of slicing and grating discs.
Other Brazilian recipes which make use of a food processor:
Pão o de Queijo (cheese bread) and Churrasco steak with salsa and rice
Cucumber Caipirinha Cocktail
Kavey Eats received a Magimix 4200 XL from Magimix.
Please leave a comment - I love hearing from you!12 Comments to "Little Orange & Lime Cakes from Brazil | Bolinhos de Laranja e Limão"
Love the bright sensation this treat must bring to the palate, loaded with all that citrus. Thanks for the recipe, and if a picture is worth a thousand words, yours says “yummy and delish” ceaselessly!
Almonds and citrus – just the kind of cake I like. I’ve had my Braun food processor for nearly 20 years and think I’ll have to look for a replacement soon. Would you recommend the Magimix?
Those cakes look seriously good and I love the idea of orange and lime together. I’m really into little cakes at the moment. I do most things by hand as I find washing my food processor really fiddly so try to use it as little as possible.
Ours is very easy to use and it means the only real effort in making a cake now is measuring out the ingredients and washing up the bowl and blade! 🙂
I am sure I would love these little cakes. Any sponge that uses almonds along with citrus flavours gets my vote. I have had my Magimix for years now and still love it although the lid does need replacing. It is currently stuck together with sellotape!
We’ve been lucky with ours as I dropped lid on floor while back and it didn’t crack! Was sure it would as it sounded loud!
Like you I’ve got the 5200 which has been serving me for 10 years now. Largely I’ve been very impressed with it although the funnel cracked a long time ago. A wider funnel would be good for slicing, I often think that by the time you’ve chopped things small enough to fit down the narrow funnel that you might as well have sliced them yourself.
One day when I grow up (and when I tidy my kitchen!!) I will get a food processor… Love these little cakes – although bolinhos sounds about a million times cuter than cakes 😉
Wow they look soooo cuuuuute. Is it just me that wants to stuff them with something like lemon curd?
I think that sounds wonderful! Too much effort for me though! 🙂
I have a problem with recipes that have lemon, lime and oranges in hem. When it says the juice of one of theses fruits I hesitate because they come in different sizes. Why aren’t the recipes stating how many mls or spoons sizes. Such a simple thing that would help with the correct amount to use.
That’s a fair complaint, I understand where you are coming from. But do please be aware that this is a personal blog and that many of my recipes are things I’ve made at home and decided to share, I’m neither a professional recipe writer nor a paid one! For the limes, I’ve really not seen much variation in the size of limes, so I’m comfortable with saying the juice of one lime. For the orange, I’d say my mental image of an average orange is around 9-10 centimetres in diameter.