TGI Friday Bake - Orange Madeira Cake

Last weekend I came home from a lovely 11 day holiday in Cyprus taken with my dear husband to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. By Tuesday I had a mile-high pile of ironing to tackle, and was also back into the hurly-burly of work ... so it has seemed like a loooooong week!!  We have also had a couple of new team members start in the office while I was away, so I thought I would give us all a TGI Friday boost by baking  a cake for our Friday team meeting :-)

Whilst recently browsing some of my favourite  baking blogs I came across a tempting recipe for orange madeira cake over at The Caked Crusader ... I've never made a madeira cake before, but it looked pretty easy so even after a tiring day at work I felt inspired to try it.

Orange Madeira Cake

 Taken from: The Caked Crusader blog post.

Ingredients:
175g unsalted butter, softened
175g golden caster sugar
3 eggs
200g self raising flour
grated zest of 1 orange
50g ground almonds

For the icing:
100g icing sugar
freshly squeezed orange juice - enough to mix to form icing (approx 2-3 tbsps)

Equipment: 
1 * 900g (2lb) loaf tin, greased and lined with baking case

Method:
1. Pre-heat oven to 170°C/150°C (fan)/Gas Mark 3.
2. beat together the butter and sugar until pale and creamy.
3. Beat in the eggs one at a time, adding a little flour if it looks like mix might curdle.
4. Fold in the flour, orange zest and ground almonds.
5. Spoon into prepared tin and level the serfuce.
6. Bake for approx. 55 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.
7. leave to coll in the tin for approx. 15 minutes, then turn out and leave to cool completely on a wire rack.
8. When cool, make the icing by beating together the icing sugar and orange juice. Add the juice slowly so the icing doesn't become too runny.
9. Spread icing over the cake.

Observations:
This really was easy, smelled lovely and was well received by my workmates. My only possible error was that being very inexperienced in making icing,I  initially added a bit too much juice ... it's amazing how much icing sugar a small amount of juice can absorb!! This just meant that after it had dribbled messily down the sides I did have to move the cake from plate A to plate B for presentation .. but what's a little extra washing up?? Overall very pleased with my first madeira cake and I'm sure i will make either this or a lemon version again in future.

I would like to enter this attempt into  Love Cake - September - Back to School (Something New)

That's all for today - enjoy your weekend.
Hugs,