Cranberry, Pecan and Orange Loaf

This was a strange recipe! The cake tasted good but managed to be both fragile and too dense at the same time; usually a dense cake holds together like a builder's brick, but every time I handled this cake I expected it to fall into a pile of crumbs. I found the recipe  here, on Sally's Baking Addiction, while looking for recipes using orange and frozen cranberries together. Although I wondered about the advisability of relying on just bicarbonate of soda to raise the mixture, the cake looked very attractive, and a streusel topping adds interest without having to add the optional glazing afterwards.

I followed the cake recipe exactly, but reduced the butter in the streusel topping to 30g and added 35g of finely chopped pecans too.

I had fun chopping frozen cranberries, but my mini-processor just about coped, although it shaved a lot of small flakes of fruit off too, which perhaps accounts for the much darker cake crumb in my loaf, compared to Sally's photos. The cake batter was very wet, and I expected to find that all the fruit and nut pieces had sunk, but they were fairly evenly distributed.

The flavour of this cake was OK, but nothing exceptional. None of the cake flavours really stood out, despite there being strongly flavoured ingredients there. The best part was the crunchy, nutty and spicy streusel topping, which was a good contrast to the rather bland cake. Overall, not a cake I'm likely to repeat.