Feeding Friendship: Blood Orange Yogurt Cake with Blood Orange Curd

I totally lucked out when I picked winter citrus for this round of Feeding Friendship - this week is Citrus Fest at Central Market! That means I had access to sour oranges (mojo anyone?), limequats, Buddha's Hands, and all sorts of other great citrus. After sampling all of my options, I settled on blood oranges and decided to make a blood orange curd I found at Simple Math Bakery (love the name of that blog).

The curd took way longer than I was expecting to come up to temperature, but it is a pretty low maintenance recipe.  Mix together the sugar, eggs, zest, and juice and heat over a double boiler for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.  Don't freak out if you get a few egg bits, just strain it before you mix it into the butter.  Thanks to the sweet and slightly floral flavor of the blood orange, the resulting curd is complex and very sweet!  I'd recommend cutting back on the sugar and increasing the lemon juice.

I've had a yogurt cake from Clotilde Dusoulier's first book earmarked to make for the longest time.  Then I found Smitten Kitchen's yogurt cake recipe with lime zest and black berry sauce and marked that.  Well, the time had finally come to make a yogurt cake.  I followed the Smitten Kitchen recipe, but substituted blood orange zest and juice for lime.  The wonderful thing about this cake is it is all one bowl.

Once all the wet ingredients are blended, you sift in the dry ingredients and stir - done!  I love a batter that doesn't begin with creaming butter (mostly because I never remember to soften my butter ahead of time).  Evidently, I threw away my round cake pans before our last move (???).  Or at least I can't find them.  So I made cupcakes instead.

I cooked them at the same temperature for 25 minutes and they came out just right.  The yogurt creates a really moist, tender crumb and allows you to cut back the amount of fat used in the batter.  I'll definitely be making these again, but with extracts or more zest to bump up the flavor.

My pictures don't do it justice (I made this late last night), but the curd is a pretty salmon color and, due to the lower acidity of blood oranges, runnier than lemon curd you may have had.  I have about three cups of curd left, but don't worry, I have a plan for it!