Baking a Mandarin orange Love Cake with AI help

 Mandarin Orange "Love" cake

I had a whole bunch of mandarin and regular oranges. The oranges weren't very sweet, and the Mandarin oranges were looking worse for wear.  I didn't want to make juice, so I used Co-Pilot to try and get some ideas of what to do with them.

I settled on a Mandarin Orange Love Cake.  But me being me, I had to tweak it.  

I just used all the oranges I had.  I reserved one mandarin orange segment to put on top of the batter before it went into the oven.   I would probably just dip them in chocolate and use them for decoration afterward, now to get max beauty and give it a chocolate orange flavour.  It also didn't use any extracts, so I added a combo of vanilla and almond.  It turned out so light and fluffy.

It only required one bowl and a whisk to mix it up, and no creaming or melting butter because it uses Olive oil.  So other than the measuring utensils, it doesn't need a lot of tools, except a round pan.  I was trying to see if Dollarama had a heart-shaped pan, but they didn't, so I just made it in a spring form pan and added parchment to the bottom after I greased it.

I don't normally write recipes, but this is a new tool to use to find recipes and to maybe tweak recipes, and also, I just copied the recipe into Word and added my tweaks.   So I wouldn't say this is my original recipe, but it's a fast way to build your own digital cookbook for recipes you want to keep and use multiple times.  This one is a keeper for when you need to bring something to a Potluck or other kind of party because it can look simple or you can make it fancy, and it's basically done in about an hour.

Although AI scares me, it's also a great tool for some things, like cooking ideas, and I use it for my blog posts to correct my horrible grammar.  I still write, but it points out things I need to correct, which is super helpful.  I know there will come a time when cooking and writing recipes will all be replaced because with machine learning, the wealth of recipes available from around the Globe will continue to increase.

I would recommend it for the culinary-challenged people who don't know how to cook but like to eat good food and don't know what to do with the food they have.  As an example, if you get a farm share box and get ingredients you never tried before.  Where you used Google before, you can now be specific about what you want and get pretty close to solving your food challenges.

Here is the final recipe and the results:

🍊❤️ Valentine’s Day Mandarin Love Cake

What you need and why it's so good

• Uses 3–5 mandarins
• One bowl
• No mixer
• Naturally moist and fragrant
• Dress it up with a heart‑shaped powdered sugar stencil or a drizzle

⭐ Ingredients

• 1 cup sugar
• 2 large eggs
• ½ cup olive oil (or neutral oil)
• Zest of 2 mandarins
• Juice of 3–4 mandarins (about ½ cup)
• 1 tsp vanilla or almond extract
• 1 ½ cups all‑purpose flour
• 1 ½ tsp baking powder
• Pinch of salt 

⭐ Instructions

1. Prep Heat oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease a loaf pan or an 8‑inch round pan.
2. Mix the wet ingredients. Whisk sugar + eggs until smooth. Add oil, mandarin zest, and mandarin juice.
3. Add the dry ingredients. Stir in flour, baking powder, and salt until just combined.
4. Bake Pour into the pan and bake 30–40 minutes, until golden and a toothpick comes out clean.
5. Valentine’s finish. Let cool. Place a paper heart on top, dust with powdered sugar, then lift the heart away for a cute design or top with chocolate-covered mandarin segments, candied orange peel, or a mandarin orange glaze.

 

    

*Note: This post was made with the assistance of AI, but all text was written by me.