My Mother's Orange Squares

Well here it is another Christmas day ! I hope you are enjoying a beautiful day with your families where ever it is you may be ! We are all still in our pyjamas, watching movies, enjoying new gifts, and just relaxing. I do not know about you , but I am really exhausted, I feel like I was hit by a truck. I gave it my all this week, really just trying to do and make or bake all of my kids favorite things. It's what I love most about Christmas, getting everything ready for them, in the hopes that many, many years from now, they may stop and remember, "that´s how mom used to make it". Find myself a bit overwhelmed, I admit that baking gingerbread cookies this year, was something I had crossed off the to do list. Somehow I thought it was something the kids would not miss, boy was I wrong, yesterday mid afternoon, Simon asked, "when are we baking the gingerbread cookies?" I told him "we already have so many other things on the dessert table, we can leave them out this year". He just looked at me, and said, "mom they remind me of christmas, if we don´t have them it won't be the same!". He stopped me in my tracks, he is only ten but already has Christmas memories, reminded me of my own Christmas memories, and my mothers orange squares. When I think of christmas as a small child, my earliest of memories, when we lived in Toronto, were the squares my mother always made for the holidays. These wonderful, moist , sweet squares of orange cake, soaked in an qrange syrup, and topped with a bright red, glacé cherry. So I baked my mothers orange squares for our dessert table, and last night we left out milk and gingerbread cookies for santa. I want to wish you and your famlies a very Merry Christmas !

That little cutie pie is me, and there on the table, bottom right hand corner are the orange squares !

180 grams sugar
180 grams flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 oranges (zest and juice)
100 grams of butter
2 eggs separated

for the syrup:
juice of the two oranges
250 grams sugar

glacé/ candied cherries


Preheat the oven 180/350

Grease an 9x9 baking pan.

In a bowl cream the butter, eggs and the sugar. Add the flour, baking powder, and the zest of the two oranges. Then whip the two egg whites till stiff, and fold into the batter. Pour into baking tin, and bake in oven for about 20 minutes, or until done when tested with a tooth pick.

While cake is baking, make the orange syrup, bring to a boil in a small pan the juice of the two oranges, and the 250 grams of sugar.

When cake is done, remove from the oven, poke cake all over with a fork, a pour the hot sryup over the cake while still warm. Let the cake cool completely. When cool cut into squares, and top with a glacé cherry.


***I double the cake recipe, and use a 13x9 cake pan, allowing a longer baking time. 35-40 minutes.
I DO NOT double the syrup quantity....I usually use 300 grams of sugar, and the juice of 3 oranges.

***this recipe was given to me by my mother , over the phone, during my first ever Christmas on the island, the year I got married here, in 1997. So it is not very detail elaborate, but I promise it is very good !