Welcome to March, the month that the chefs call among themselves the fifth season, when the stalls are starting to become repetitive, to say the least… We can already hear you: we had squash and parsnips! On to root vegetables! And how we understand you. We can’t wait for spring to bring back its strawberries and asparagus too. In the meantime, a little patience and sweetness with this orange cake from the book Lunch at Jojo’s by Johanna Kaufmann (Mediapop, 17 euros): “It’s holiday love. I met it in an Athenian bakery where I took a slice every morning. Wet and fluffy, I couldn’t understand where the texture came from. I found out later that there was no flour but crumbled filo pastry in a mixture of oil and Greek yogurt.”
Johanna Kaufmann is a food writer and photographer in Strasbourg and she has the reflexes of a home cook: she does with what she has at hand and she likes that the recipes are not alike from time to time. “When I crumble the doughshe says, I like to do it coarsely to have a cake that is far from being uniform inside, to bite into a large piece of crispy dough or a small one depending on where you start it.» Partisan of instinct, her recipes remain very precise, especially when it comes to sweets. She slips us a rule of pastry life before leaving: “If your cake is hot, soak it in a cold syrup. If the cake has cooled, cover it with hot syrup. It takes a temperature shock to force the meeting. Might as well live in March under the orange sun.
You need (for 12 to 24 parts): 1 whole untreated orange and half of another; 500 g filo pastry; 400 g drained Greek yoghurt; 300 g of brown sugar; 60 cl of orange juice; 20 cl of olive oil; 1 packet of baking powder; 1 teaspoon powdered ginger. For the syrup: 200 g brown sugar; 125ml orange juice; 1 teaspoon powdered ginger.
Pour all the ingredients for the syrup into a saucepan, cook for eight to ten minutes over low heat (very light simmering), stirring occasionally so that it doesn’t overflow, then leave to cool in a bowl.
Detach the sheets of filo pastry from each other, place them (crumpled up into large balls) four by four (or six by six) on baking sheets then bake for a few minutes at 180°C, until they pass from soft to crispy.
Prepare the paste by mixing the orange juice, brown sugar, yogurt, oil and powdered ginger in a large bowl. Zest an orange then incorporate the crumbled filo sheets. Pour everything into a large rectangular mold, cover with the oranges sliced into thin half-rings and bake for forty to fifty minutes at 180°C. Coat right out of the oven with the cooled syrup.