The birthdays keep coming around here! This week it was my husband’s turn to celebrate another year. Like JR, he’s not big on sweets, but I don’t think it’s a birthday unless someone sings and you blow out candles. So I was going to make him a cake whether he liked it or not.
Of course, I’d prefer that he like it. So I set out to make a cake that I thought would please my grown birthday boy. My husband gravitates towards fruit desserts so I decided to incorporate some fruit flavors into his cake.
As I have said about a million times by now, winter is the best season for citrus, so I settled on a chocolate orange cake. I thought that combination would find favor with all four members of the household, especially after the success of my chocolate orange truffles.
Someone I managed to make and photograph this cake on a busy Sunday when both kids had Hebrew school in the morning, Zuzu had a 12:30 call time — she was doing hair and makeup for the school musical — and JR had a piano competition downtown. Plus, I had to make my husband’s favorite dinner, chicken parmesan, as well.
You don’t even have to photograph this cake. (Unless you’re a food blogger too. Are you?) So I feel certain that you have enough time to make this cake for your family. No boxes or mixes allowed! This is a from-scratch project, and it’s really not that hard.
The one trick that I did use to streamline this project was to fill my cake layers with the blood orange curd that I made last week. You may not have a jar of orange curd lying around, so here is what I suggest you do instead.
One, the day before you want to bake the cake, make a batch of orange curd. It’s a 15-minute project, as I explain in the recipe, so that is not asking a lot. Plus, the orange curd filling really adds to the orange flavor of the final product.
If you don’t have time to make the orange curd, you could buy a jar of good-quality orange marmalade and use that to fill your cake. Or, another alternative would be to double the recipe for the chocolate frosting and fill the layers with frosting.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to wait until the cake layers are cool before attempting to frost them. So try to spread the work out. For example, I made the cake layers in the morning while the kids were at Hebrew school. Then, I waited until a frantic hour after lunch and before having to take a very nervous JR downtown for his piano competition to frost it.
I recommend that you maybe frost your cake in less of a rush than I did. It helps to be a bit Zen when frosting a cake. But who am I kidding? Our lives are all like that, aren’t they? We are all pulled in a million different directions at all times.
But if you can carve out the time to make your loved ones birthday cakes from scratch amidst all the chores and homework and activities, they will remember it and they will feel the love that you put into it. Honestly. No one takes a homemade cake for granted.
(Incidentally, JR did extremely well at his competition. And thank goodness too because it has been a rough couple of weeks around here. JR is a perfectionist and feels tremendous pressure to do well at everything. Zuzu has gone to the same piano competition for years and not once seemed to feel any stress about it, even when she was in line to win a gold cup. So, there you go. Two kids, two totally different personalities.)
But back to cake, which is something that I actually understand. I’m not much of a cake decorator, so I decorated this cake very simply with some pretty slices of blood orange. I always like it when a garnish telegraphs what flavors are in the dish. (I used blood oranges because I had them, but any orange will do.)
Incidentally, orange is incorporated in both the cake and the frosting. I added some orange zest and juice to the cake batter for flavor and then used more orange juice and a splash of Grand Marnier in the chocolate frosting. Oh yeah, baby. Grand Marnier in the frosting. That’s just how we roll. (It is like a tablespoon, honestly. No one could tell.)
So if you have a winter birthday in your family. Or you just love to celebrate, make this chocolate orange cake. It’s like a basic yellow cake with chocolate frosting — the very best kind of cake there is — but with a fun, sunny twist.
Happy birthday to my dear husband!
Ingredients
- 2 cups cake flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 6 oz unsalted butter, softened
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 5 eggs at room temperature
- 1 TB vanilla extract
- Zest of one orange
- 2/3 cup sour cream
- 1 TB freshly squeezed orange juice
- 6 oz orange curd or orange marmalade at room temperature
- 2 cups powdered sugar
- 1/4 cup cocoa powder
- 6 oz butter, softened
- 1 TB freshly squeezed orange juice
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 TB Grand Marnier or other orange-flavored liqueur
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 and spray two 8 or 9-inch round baking pans with nonstick baking spray.
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.
- In the bowl of standing mixer, cream the butter and sugar on medium-low speed until light and fluffy, about four minutes.
- Add the eggs one at a time, the vanilla and the orange zest.
- Whisk the sour cream and orange juice together.
- Alternate adding the dry ingredients and the sour cream mixture beginning and ending with the dry ingredients. Mix just until incorporated. Do not overbeat.
- Divide the batter evenly between the two pans.
- Bake 20-25 minutes until the cakes have pulled away from the sides of the pan and a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.
- Cool in the pans for a few minutes, then turn cakes out onto a cooling rack. Cool completely before frosting.
- Spread the orange curd or marmalade on top of one of the layers. Invert the second layer and place on top of the filling.
- To make the frosting, sift together the powdered sugar and cocoa powder.
- In the bowl of a standing mixer, beat together the powdered sugar-cocoa mixture, the butter, the orange juice and the liqueur until smooth.
- Frost the cake using an offset spatula and decorate.
