But first, cake: Cheat's Orange Blueberry Sour Cream Cake

Before I launch in to my HK foodie musings, I wanted to share with you this amazingly quick and incredibly easy cake recipe. 

I'll warn you straight up that this recipe uses boxed cake mix. I know baking purists out there are horrified right now but a box of cake mix can be a total life saver in baking emergencies.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for making things from scratch. There's a certain meditative quality to measuring out your flour, butter, eggs but every once in a while you need to produce baking in a bind and tout suite and for those situations I always keep a couple of boxed cake mixes in the pantry.  

Think of cake mix as a baking emergency kit. You have a bare bones pantry, a friend is popping round in an hour, what do you do???

The awesome thing with this cake is that it uses only FIVE ingredients. Why these five you ask? They were the only things I had left in the pantry Post-Christmas/New Years and pre-going away for 5 weeks. We had 1 orange, the last few drops of carton orange juice, some left over sour cream from a salad. There was no flour, no white sugar, no butter. We'd even eaten all these eggs.

But luckily there was one box of cake mix.

And with those few scavenged ingredients, thanks largely to the cake mix, I could whip up this super light and fluffy fruity cake in just over an hour. From start to finish. I'm sure Bear Grylls would be proud.

Cheat's Orange Blueberry Sour Cream Cake

1 box of vanilla/yellow cake mix
1 cup orange juice
170g sour cream (~ 3/4 cup)
1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries (NB: )
1-2 oranges, cut into thin slices (around 5mm thickness)

1. Preheat the oven to 180oC (or 160oC fan bake). Line a 28cm spring form pan with tinfoil or baking paper.

2. Empty the cake mix into a large bowl.  Using your fingers squeeze out any lumps. Make a well in the centre.  Add the sour cream and orange juice into the well. Using an electric beater, beat for around 1 minute.  Gently fold in the blueberries using a spatula.

3. Pour the cake batter into the prepared pan.  Arrange the orange slices on top.  Bake for 50mins to 1 hour.  The cake is done lightly golden on top and a skewer comes out clean. If the cake is getting too golden on top before it is done inside, cover with a piece of tinfoil.  Allow to cool for 10 minutes in tin.  Dust with icing sugar. Serve with greek yoghurt.

Tips:

* If using frozen berries use them straight out of the freezer. 
* I like using Betty Crocker cake mixes.