First, Sift Out The Ants

Invited to Easter dinner at daughter Katie's house, with a chance to meet niece Molly's baby June, I felt the least I could do was bring dessert. I had planned on a big platter of fresh fruit but, despite it being late March, I still hadn't found any strawberries worth buying (no hint of strawberry scent to the ones in my market) and good strawberries are usually the anchor for any fruit plate worth its salt.  Hmmm...

I resolved to bake a cake instead. I had seen a recipe in Sunset magazine that sounded intriguing to me, a cake made with whole oranges whacked up, peel and all, in a food processor, then added to the cake batter. Citrus is still at its height around here, so I was assured of rich orange flavor. The article promised that the cake would not be too sweet and, knowing my audience, that sounded just right for the assembled family group.

When I got to the glaze, however, I was stunned by the amount of confectioner's sugar needed for the glaze. Holy cats!  I consulted with my visiting dessert expert, my Fairy Godson, and he agreed that that was 'way too much glaze, so I planned to make about 1/3 of the recipe and drizzle away.

When I poured out my confectioner's sugar, I noticed little black specks in its pristine whiteness. Puzzled, I dipped in a finger and pulled out - an ant!  A poor, desiccated ant who had apparently found his way into the sugar but died in sweet glory, a victim to the preservative power of sugar. In the olden days, people learned to preserve things like fruit in dense sugar, as it draws out the water from any living thing, be it bacteria or ant, and leaves a sad little husk behind.

So, step one of the glaze recipe should have read, "First, sift out the ants."  

We had a good laugh over that one as we did, indeed, sift out that ant and his few brethren. We didn't really think a little formic acid would make much difference to the taste, but the little black specks were less than appetizing. It's ant karma, really - they bug me every winter when they invade my kitchen, so it's only fair that my sugar take its toll on the ant armies. 

When the cake was finished, it looked sadly plain, not richly golden with stripes of white icing as the one in Sunset, so I dressed mine up with some of our Easter jelly beans and foil-wrapped chocolate eggs for a more festive look.

We cut the cake after dinner - it was moist and very dense, like pound cake in its avoirdupois. A slender slice was plenty.  The rich orange flavor was lovely and we all liked the bits of orange peel in the crumb that kept it from being overly sweet, but we also think it would be even better with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream alongside.

Interestingly, I added the jelly beans just for decoration, but every single one, plus the chocolate eggs, were eaten as well as the cake.  I didn't tell anyone about the ants.