Orange Chiffon Cake - Gram and Allana

It's my birthday and growing up, apart from a few animal shaped cakes that looked like they should have been painted on cave walls, birthday cakes were made in a tube pan, that means angelfood cake (I think the only cake in our house that was made from a box mix) or Orange Chiffon Cake.  This is also the cake that we remember had money inside, which made it an extra special birthday cake.  I remember my sister Allana making this cake a lot in the summer, I know other people made it at other times but this one I really identify with her so she's getting a mention in the title credit.
 
Gram gave this recipe to Mom to help use up all the eggs from the chickens, there really were more eggs than we could eat sometimes, I can remember having multiple 4-litre sized ice-cream buckets full of eggs in the fridge some summers.  In the summer the chickens had such rich diets from all the vegetable scraps, kitchen waste*, garden trimmings, and grass clippings they were fed and they got so much sunshine in those long northern days that their eggs had these impossibly deep dark orange yolks, all the baking had a strong yellow tint - no such thing as a white cake at our house in the summer, so the orange chiffon cake was a warm golden colour that complimented it's name and flavour beautifully. 
 
I can also remember trudging out to the chicken coop every morning in the snow to feed and water the chickens and collect the eggs before school and getting paid $1 per week to do it.**  There weren't many paid chores around our house, but if we took on an extra responsibility we did get rewarded - side note the chicken chore also required the chore doer to shovel a path out to the coop every time it snowed (that was on top of regular shovelling duty) and you weren't allowed to quit the job mid-winter so if you were lazy and shovelled a narrow little path at the start of the snowy season you made a rod for your own back until spring.***  I'm also pretty sure that if no one took chicken care and egg collecting as a paid extra around the house, it would have become a mandated free chore.
 
Orange Chiffon Cake
 
Pre-heat the oven to 300^F (150^C)
The cake is mixed in three separate bowls, then combined at the end.
 
Bowl A - use your mixer for then transfer the whisked egg whites into another bowl so you can use your mixer again for Bowl C
Whisk together to form stiff peaks
5 egg whites
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
 
Bowl B - use any bowl big enough to hold the ingredients
Mix together
1 1/2 cup flour
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
 
Bowl C - use your mixer again for this
Whisk until pale (or somewhat lighter if you had summer eggs from our chickens)
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup orange juice
5 egg yolks
zest from 1 orange (or 3/4 tsp of lemon extract, but I don't remember this being in our house)
 
Now incorporate backwards.
 
Into the egg yolk mixture in Bowl C, gradually whisk in the dry ingredients from Bowl B, then gently fold in the egg whites from Bowl A.
 
At this point I'm going to make a dastardly confession, this is pure sacrilege in the baking world but I'm just going to say it.  I don't fold in my whisked egg whites.  I'm really bad at folding in egg whites.  I either over mix to such an extreme that I've lost half the air in the whites that there was no point in being so finicky or I end up with slimy cooked blobs of un-mixed-in egg white all through my cake.  I've given up trying.  I add them (usually in two or three batches) to my mixer and stop/start the machine using the lowest setting so that it barely swirls and I push down the egg whites every few times and occasionally pull the batter from the bottom up over the top, the process usually takes about four minutes.  And maybe it's because I'm so bad at folding in egg whites, but I don't think I lose any more air than if I spent half an hour trying to fold in the whites.  If I'm really worried about the potential loss of airiness of my cake I'll whisk an extra egg white at the start.  There you have it, my dirty secret, use it wisely and at your own risk.
 
Pour the batter into a 10 inch loose bottom tube pan like you'd use for angelfood cake and bake for 25 minutes at 300^F (150^C) then turn the heat up to 325^F (162^C) and bake for a further 20 - 25 minutes.
 
When done, invert the pan on top of a bottle so that it hangs upside down to cool, my cake pan is annoyingly 10 1/2 inches and it really makes a difference but has convenient little feet to cool it upside down so I forgive it.  By the way, this is one time where you don't want a non-stick cake pan, you want the cake to stick to the pan and not fall out while it cools.

Once cool, flip the pan right side up, run a knife around the sides and the tube of the cake to loosen, then pull the side part off, run the knife along the bottom of the pan, then flip the cake over onto a plate and the tube/bottom part of the pan should slide out.

Next is Gram's money magic trick, I only remember there being coins in tube pan cakes but Gram says she put them in any cake that she made as a birthday cake.  I can remember learning this trick for the first time in Gram's kitchen in Duncan, I really felt like we were being sneaky, I can remember being so excited about being let in on the secret of how to get the money into the cake.  I helped her wrap coins up in wax paper, then she took a knife and made some slits in the cake into which I pushed the wrapped coins, then we iced the cake which covered up the points where we pushed the coins.  Mom recently told me a story about Gram marking the point on the cake with a toothpick where one of the coins was inserted before icing the cake to make sure that the birthday boy (she had two sons) got a slice with a coin, or it might have been that there were enough coins that everyone got a slice with a coin but they were all pennies and the birthday boy got a nickel.  Either way, Gram was sneaky and I was easily impressed.

The toothpick marks out the pound coin for my slice of my birthday cake, the other coins wrapped up are pennies heh-heh-heh.

* watching chickens eat spaghetti is hilarious
** might have been $2 a week, but it certainly wasn't $5 - there was the mother of all arguments that mowing the whole lawn with the push mower was worth more than $5 and egg collection was worth a lot less than lawn mowing - I do remember it was a paltry sum even back then so I'm sure it was $1, but hey it was $1 more than your sisters were being given and you didn't have to justify why you needed/wanted money, it was yours to spend as you like.
*** occasionally Dad would run the snow blower all the way down to the chicken coop and not just stop at the barn, but I remember often having to shovel it when it was my chicken chore.