The other day I decided to make a cheesecake. The recipe called for three blood oranges, two for juice and one to be candied. When I got home from the store, I put two away in the fruit bin in the fridge and left the third out on the counter as this one was meant to be sliced and candied and that was what I planned to do first.
I sliced the orange up, prepared the syrup, dropped the slices in there and let everything simmer for an hour. Being the busy woman that I am I tended to other chores and when I returned to the stove the slices were a nice shiny black…it seems I had set the stove temperature too high.
It was late and the stores were closed, so I decided to cut just 3 slices off the top of one of the other oranges (as I really only needed one to decorate the cake), hoping there would be enough juice left to fulfill the recipe requirements. I wrapped the remaining orange in cellophane and put it away until the next day to finish the cake. I repeated the syrup and simmering and this time succeeded in producing three nice transparent slices.
The next morning, I set out to bake the cake. I needed the lovely red juice of my one and three quarter oranges to make the glaze. I opened the fridge and quickly located the amputated fruit, but was less successful at locating the third and last orange. You see I had a dozen ordinary oranges in that fruit bin and they had gotten shuffled a bit during breakfast preparation. Sure blood oranges are supposed to look different…but I was hesitant. Two oranges seemed to fit the bill. I gambled and chose one. I took it to the cutting board, sliced it open and…I lost. It was an ordinary Florida orange. No matter I retrieved the other suspect and gingerly put the knife to it, secure in the knowledge this was the one! Well…it wasn’t! Again I was looking at a nice pale Florida orange. Undaunted I returned to the fridge. I patted, weighed, rotated, smelled each and every orange in that bin…and came up with two more prospects…again cutting each one up to reveal it’s pale orange flesh…I was getting frantic. This time I randomly chose four, figuring the law of averages would surely play in my favor. Well… No such luck! Believe it or not none of them was the elusive blood orange. By now I had 18 orange halves dripping juice all over my countertop. I was beginning to worry about what to do with all these oranges. They would spoil before I had time to eat them…I could not go on cutting up more.
So I did the only reasonable thing: I got my coat, went back to the store and got myself one more blood orange.
The cake turned out very nicely and I made myself a pitcher of freshly squeezed orange juice…I still have not encountered the missing blood orange.
