🇬🇷 Portokalopita (orange cake)

Portokalopita is a traditional Greek dessert made with layers of shredded phyllo dough soaked in a fragrant syrup infused with fresh oranges. Often enjoyed chilled, portokalopita is often served with a scoop of yoghurt or ice-cream

Quick overview - What to expect from a Portokalopita:

• Strong orange aroma and taste — From fresh orange zest, juice.

• Sweet but not heavy: This cake has an orange syrup layer spread over it while still hot coming out of the oven.

• A blend of moist and crispy texture

• Serving: Typically with some greek yoghurt or vanilla Ice cream

My Portokalopita recipe - ingredients for 5 servings:

For the syrup: 150 ml water - 150 ml sugar - 1 zest of a whole orange - 1 cinnamon stick

For the cake: 220g of phyllo sheets - 2 eggs - 75g or less sugar - zest of 1 1/4 oranges - 100g 2% plain Greek yoghurt  - 10g baking powder - 150ml vegetable oil - vegetable oil for greasing baking pan 

* Extra: Vanilla extract

How to make your Portokalopita 👩🏻‍🍳

1. For the syrup:

In a pan add the water, sugar, orange zest and cinnamon stick together and bring to a boil while stirring (otherwise the sugar might burn). Let it simmer for another 5 min then set aside to cool down 

2. For the cake:

- you’ll want your phyllo sheets to be dry. Set the oven to 100 degree Celsius and lay half of the amount of sheets, sheet per sheet accordion-style on an oven tray. Put in oven for 5 minutes then turn over for another 10 min. Repeat with the other batch. No matter how long they are in the oven, they have to be dry so you can crumble them into smaller pieces afterwards.

👉🏼 Each time a batch is ready already crumble the sheets into small pieces in a bowl. You’ll add the crumble pieces to the dough after.

- prepare the dough by adding to a bowl the vegetable oil, the eggs, sugar and whisk. Add the yogurt, orange juice and orange zest and whisk until properly combined. Add baking powder and whisk lightly. 

👉🏼 Add the crumbled phyllo to the dough, slowly, while whisking to avoid them stick.

- pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius - take a baking tray and spray/ brush with oil to avoid it to stick (I actually add baking paper at the bottom). Put in oven for 50 min to 1h

- take out of oven and immediately pour the syrup over the hot cake but SLOWLY so that it absorbs it well without drowning it. 

- put in fridge for at least 3h to let it cool down 

- serve as is or slightly re-heated and with (or without) some Greek yogurt 😋

Enjoy xx