Today, we will show you how to make this amazing orange cranberry pecan bundt cake and the secret extra-virgin Spanish olive oil. So delicious and so much healthier than you’d ever think possible for a cake this delicious. Okay, let’s get started. The first thing is to toast some pecans and toasted pecans. By the way, these are one of my favorite things to snack on. So instead of measuring out the approximate cup I’ll be using, I’m just gonna pour out most of the bag because these are excellent, excellent snacking material.
Now just spread them out on the sheet. And I’m gonna pop it into the oven at 350F or one 177C for about eight minutes. You want them to be nice and golden brown, like even more golden brown than they are now and they’ll be fragrant. You’ll be able to smell them, but if you toast them too long, they become bitter. So keep an eye out. Pecans are out of the oven. The pan is just cool enough to touch and I want to show you the difference between a toasted pecan and a non toasted pecan.
I wish you could taste the difference, but try the recipe. You can get that done. Nice reddish, so fragrant one is toasted. Whenever you use nuts and a recipe, you gotta toast them first. Just do it, it makes a huge difference. These will now get chopped, but this is actually way easier. Just take a handful, crunch. I think this is so much easier than chopping them.
If you get one that’s not crushed, just crush it individually. After you’ve crushed all of your pecans, we’re gonna measure out about a cup. But if you are a nut lover like me, go ahead and use like a cup and a half. Once you’ve crushed about a cup of pecans, just you know, double check to make sure maybe you’re a little bit under. If you’re a little bit over, it doesn’t matter.
Set them aside. Now we’re going to dump this into a small bowl and just dredge it with a little bit of flour. Take about a tablespoon, maybe a little bit less, just sprinkled around and now mix it up. This will help, but not solve the problem of heavy things settling in the batter, Because the flower will basically trap some air around the pecans and the cranberries as well and it’ll be settling a little bit more slowly during the baking, so all won’t fall to the bottom.
Set that aside and now we’re going to do the same thing for the cranberries. Take about a cup. If you hate cranberries, you don’t have to put them in, skip it. You can also do dried cherries, whatever you’d like. Dredge them in flower again, so just sprinkle a little toss. If you have some clumps of dried cherries just break them up. These look pretty good, set it aside, and now it’s time to work on our easy breezy batter. By the way, keep that oven on at 350 but don’t grease your bundt pan yet.
Now to the batter. Into my standing mixer, fitted with a whisk attachment. I’m adding in one and a half cups of sugar, in you go. Then we’re gonna add in five whole eggs. Just dump them in.
And now we’re going to zest an orange. I’m also going to add in just a little bit of lemon zest because I like that punch. That’s optional though And if you wanna go crazy, add more orange zest in. I am an orange zest fanatic. Whenever you zest, any citrus fruit, the best thing to do is have a nice sharp zester. I get so many questions about like how do you make zesting look so easy? It’s just because the zester is sharp.
This beautiful zest, love the color and it’s just packed with orange oil. So it’s so fragrant. And of course I know you know this, but you always zest before you juice. It’s not impossible to zest half of an orange, but it’s so much more difficult and you run the risk of really cutting yourself. So that’s done. Just a little bit of lemon zest too, I love lemon zest. Now we’re gonna mix this up for like almost 10 minutes.
It’s gonna go from being this just pile of eggs and sugar and zest into a like very thick, fluffy concoction. Not thick and fluffy like moraine, but like considerably thicker and fluffier. So whisk start low, go to high and just it’ll be running for almost 10 minutes time it. While that’s mixing up., we’re going to juice our orange. I probably need like two oranges for three quarters of a cup, strainer. Let’s measure that out. Three quarters of a cup and plus a little bit extra for my glaze.
So this mixture is pretty light and fluffy. It actually has a few more minutes to go. But do you see the difference? This is like very thick, full of tiny little air bubbles, just how we want it. But in the meantime, let’s mix up our dry mixture. It’s super easy. Three cups or 360 grams of all purpose flour right into there. Our scale will totally be helping us do this. 360 grams, one tablespoon of baking powder, in you go and half a teaspoon of salt, that’s it. Sift it up and whirl whisk it up.
Alright, now we’re going to finish up three more minutes. Nine minutes later, mixer mixer, here is what’s gonna happen. Some sour cream goes in here mixed to combine but first let’s add our three quarters of a cup of fresh orange juice back into that bowl. And where is that like delicious, wonderful texture? Is it like soft cake is gonna come from? It’s coming from a wonderful Extra-Virgin olive oil. This one comes from Olive Oils from Spain. I love the smell. It’s really just like everything you want olive oil to be.
So let’s drizzle that in there. We want one full cup of olive oil for this cake. This might be one of the healthiest cakes I’ve ever made because all that Extra Virgin olive oil is such a good fat for you. It’s not artery clogging. It’s really like just the perfect balance. That’s why I love cooking with olive oil, but you can also bake with it too. So this one is gonna be a delightful, delicious but healthy cake. Pour that in there. Let’s have that half cup of sour cream right in there.
If you don’t have sour cream, you can use plain yogurt or if you want to make this a non dairy cake, just add in an extra half a cup of the extra Virgin olive oil from Spain, mix. Now we’re gonna pour in our olive oil and orange juice mixture. That was very fast, very fast. was like (makes whirling noises) Now, on slow, we’re gonna pour in our olive oil and orange juice mixture. Notice there’s no splatters. Perfect, okay. We have our dry mixture, so while this mixes on low, we’re just gonna add this in slowly.
I’m gonna use my hands to guide it, And let me just tell you, you need to put olive oil in everything. Super high in antioxidants. Rich in monounsaturated fats, it has anti-inflammatory purposes and it’s delicious. Look at this, we have a delicious, very nice liquid batter. What you wanna do is get all of that zest off of the whisk because that’s the best part. I love zest. We’re almost done with our batter and almost done with the cake. It’s so easy. If you want, you can add in a teaspoon of
orange blossom water to really up the orange ante here. I will be doing that since I love oranges. It’s like about a teaspoon? We have one cup of chopped and flowered and toasted pecans, not in that order. Toss those in and one cup of not chopped, but flowered and untested dried cranberries. Before I mix them up, I’m going to make sure to get this situation all nice and slippery. I’m using some baking spray. So just really, really hit it. Get that column too. You don’t want to have any bits that are not slippery.
It needs to be really slippery to come out of the pan. You know what? I’m going to cheat just a little bit on this cake and be tricky. I’m reserving some of the batter with almost none of the nuts. You can do this beforehand before you pour everything in there. Now I’m going to put this in the pan and really get it into those crevices, the nuts and the cranberries. If they’re falling at the bottom of the pan, they might take up some space in the batter and you want this to have like a very beautiful edge,
so let’s just drizzle that on to the very bottom. Now I’m gonna knock this really hard on the counter, but I’m going to put there’s some towel underneath so I don’t damage the counter. It’s very delicate soap stone. If you want to be a little bit extra, go ahead and just push down to really make sure that batter is coating And I’m pushing the batter out towards the crevices too. Now just fold in those nuts that have been sitting there along with the cranberries. This batter smells just bonkers.
Oh my gosh, I wish you could smell it. It’s so unexpected to have the really beautiful like fragrant plate, just so subtle, the olive oil fragrance, but it’s combining with the orange and just an amazing way. Amazing, I tell you. Okay, that’s nice and folded. You’re going to fill this up about maybe two thirds of the way because there will be rising happening and that’s actually fine. And now I’ll have enough batter leftover for six mini bunts or I think you can actually make two of these.
The big bunt pans are gargantuan and they bake forever, So I like the next size down. Give this one more tap that’s going to bake up for about 40 minutes. If you’re making the giant 50 minutes to an hour, move it around like 180 degrees halfway through baking and then keep an eye on it towards the end because it’s going to go from being like perfectly done to perfectly done but really caramelized on the outside and some people are very finicky. Some people like me are finicky about how
burnt their cake looks. I do like the way it tastes though, especially on a bundt because there’s a little bit of crunchiness on the outside. The inside is very soft and pillowy and the glaze we’re going to make for the outside has a little bit of crunch too, especially when it hardens. While everything’s baking, I’m going to make some glaze. Now I’m assuming this is gonna have a double glaze recipe cause I made a lot of cakes, but you know, let’s start off with one cupish
of confectioner’s sugar. You could sift that if you want, but it’ll all work out in the end. Now I’m going to drizzle in some of my orange juice. Very exact recipe, you know, about some of, but you’re going to be adding more and less of each ingredient to get the right consistency. And this is gonna look like a mess to begin with. Like is this gonna form of glop? And then it’ll all tighten up in the end. If you want your glaze to be a beautiful color, try adding in some raspberry juice or blood oranges
for a nice soft millennial pink. I’m fine with like a nice kind of paper off white color for the orange. So this is actually like a pretty nice drizzling consistency but I think I want a thicker drip. So just add more confectioners’ sugar, there we go. That confectioners’ sugar is like basically all air. So once you introduce a liquid, it just, like, compresses to nothing. So here’s the gloppy mess I was talking about, but this will all get worked out. You have to give it basically a second just for that.
All that, like confectioners’ sugar to absorb the liquid from the orange juice. And then it will, it’ll loosen back up again. But if it doesn’t, you can add in some more juice. And I think I’m actually going to add just a bit of lemon juice here. I really like my glaze to have like an acid kick cause it’s all sugar. So you want to have a contrast. So a little bit of mixing later, we have a nice glaze, and this is the dripping consistency I like. You can see it’s going to form like a nice ribbon
just for a moment before it oozes back into itself. That’s gonna be perfect for that kind of like sexy glaze that we wanna have at the end of it, oh, love it. I’m gonna warn you though, this will dry out really quickly. So I’m going to cover it in plastic wrap and just understand that I’ll be adding in some more lemon juice before I’m ready to pour because even covered it will dry out and thicken up. My little mini buns, they’re out of the oven and I’m just gonna trim the very top, most fluffy parts.
But just on the inside that’s for snacking later. I just want to have the, the doming a little bit under control, but this is actually optional, right? Cooling rack and we’ll flip them over carefully cause this pan is super hot. These are a nice golden color. Lots of cranberries are visible and I’m going to let them cool down before I glaze them. So don’t eat them right away even though they’re really delicious and you can just pulled them apart and dip them in that glaze. Don’t do that.
This cake just came out of the oven a minute ago and normally you might want to have a bundt cake rest for like five minutes in the pan just cause it’s so tender right out of the oven. But I’m feeling very impatient today and cocky. So let’s see how this goes. Flip it under and do you think it’s going to be okay? Should I check it out? We’ll look at that. This is gorgeous, beautiful. I love it. Really aromatic. I’m going to let this cool down since it’s steaming up, but right after it’s cool,I can drizzle over some beautiful orange and lemon glaze and then get to eating.
Pouring all of this really zingy glaze over my cake. You can just douse it in the glaze or be sparing if you want. It’s really delicious just right out of the oven, but the glaze is such a nice little finishing top and I love it. If you mix up a really thin glaze it’ll all just soak into the cake and kind of disappear. If you do a really thick glaze, you’ll have that nice white strip. They’re delicious too and so small. Look at this. Let me, let me break this up for, for you, what? More cranberries, pecans,
like is there a magic inside of this? Why does it taste so good? Okay, here’s the deal, that oil, that Extra Vitgin, Spanish olive oil, so good. All that zest in there, totally a good idea. Every glaze you make should have orange and/or lemon juice in it. I hope you liked the blog. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.
