Orange plump cake

Everybody's favourite! Plump Cake!! This one is Orange flavour, you can choose flavour of your choice

Ingredients

1 cup plain flour(maida)

1/2 cup margarine (cooking butter)

2 tbsp condensed milk

3/4th cup sugar

3 eggs

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda(mitha soda)
Vanilla essence or vanilla extract

1/2 cup orange pulp (or any fruit pulp of your choice)

pinch of salt

Take a clean dry bowl and add the flour (by sieving), baking powder and baking soda along with a pinch of salt. Use a wooden spatula to mix all the ingredients well.

[About the bowl and spatula..  I have a separate bowl and spatula that I use for baking and nothing else, it keeps them free from any form of smell and always ready to use when you think of baking. Its very important that your baking utensils are absolutely smell free (of other foods) and dry. No matter how much Indian dish washer detergents claim to remove food smell, I somehow never feel 100% sure of it...]

Powder the sugar. In a separate bowl mix butter, sugar,eggs,orange juice and milkmaid and whisk well. Whisk until the mixture looks well blended and shiny.

[Some people whisk manually by using a spatula, but I prefer using an egg beater as it whisks to perfection. ]

Add the liquid mixture to the bowl with flour, add 4 drops of vanilla essence and gently mix with spatula. Now, whisk the whole mixture again.

[Vanilla extract - Made out of vanilla fruit.Pure form of vanilla. Vanilla essence - Chemical equivalent of extract.. Its hard to find extract even in cities like Mumbai. You can find it in Godrej Nature's Basket outlets. Essence is easy to find and pretty good replacement for extract. If you are lucky to get extract, add 1 tbsp extract instead of essence in this recipe ]

Do not whisk it for more than 5 mins as it will produce heat and your baking agents will become active even before you microwave your mixture. This will lead to half baked or lump cake.

Ok, now you are ready to microwave it. Take your baking tin and greese it just enough, not pouring. Now take a spoon full of maida and sprinkle it on the greesed tin and shake your tin in all directions to spread maida evenly.  Pour the mixture into the tin. While you start preparing your baking tin, preheat microwave at 180 c. Once it is done, put the baking tin in microwave and bake at 180 degrees for 30 mins.

After 30 mins, poke the cake in the center with a knife till the bottom. If the knife comes out clean, your cake is done, otherwise reset at 180 degrees for another 5 mins. Leave it to cool in the microwave itself.

[Do NOT keep the cake directly under the fan for cooling, it will make the cake moist. Transfer the cake on to a wire rack and let it cool on its own. By cool, I mean bringing it to room temparature.]