There is plenty of fresh orange going on in this fresh orange layer cake. Freshly squeezed orange juice and grated orange zest are in both the cake and the buttercream. You can expect it to have a wonderful orange flavor. It’s not your typical chocolate or vanilla cake. Orange is a flavor that you don’t see often, but it’s a wonderful deviation from the norm.
How to make Fresh Orange Layer Cake:
Sometimes people are a little intimidated to make a cake from scratch, but there is no need to be. You just need to make sure you use the proper ingredients. This orange cake recipe calls for using cake flour. That’s important. Buy the cake flour! If you’re really not into buying cake flour, you can make your own cake flour using all purpose flour (it’s easy to do). You’ll begin by sifting the dry ingredients. Then you’ll mix shortening, eggs, sugar and orange zest. To combine the two, you’ll add the dry ingredients into the wet a little at a time, adding orange juice and milk in between additions. Then you have your orange cake batter, it’s divided between pans and baked for 30 minutes. A few people have asked if they can use unsalted butter in place of the shortening. The answer is, “I think so!” I haven’t tested out this recipe using butter, but shortening and butter are usually interchangeable when baking cakes. It shouldn’t mess with the texture of the cake much.
How to decorate an orange cake:
I have a great recipe for orange buttercream frosting that I’ve included with the cake recipe. You can use that frosting recipe for the cake, or you can use my favorite buttercream recipe or whatever recipe you prefer. We opted to frost the orange cake in the photos in a “naked way.” This means we scraped the sides so you could see the cake layers. That’s just an option, and you can frost it completely, if you want. We used half fresh orange slices to decorate the sides of the cake and a little orange twist on top too.
This is a wonderful cake for a special celebration. It’s a welcome change from having chocolate cake as the star of the show. And I think people generally appreciate some creativity when it comes to dessert.
Enjoy your fresh orange cake!
Here are a few more layer cake recipes you might like to try:
Chocolate Harvest Cake Spice Cake White Wedding Cake Best Chocolate Cake Recipe Black Forest Cake Strawberry Layer Cake with Cheesecake Frosting Blackberry Cake Coconut Cake with Raspberry Buttercream Filling
