Orange Vanilla French Buttercream Cake is a recipe that can be great for any celebration. The cake is light, delicious, and easy to make.
Guest-Worthy Cake
This Orange Vanilla French Buttercream Cake recipe is worth trying at least once. It is a white cake, perfect for winter holidays, filled with orange buttercream, covered with fondant, and decorated with little fondant figurines.
As you can imagine from the photos, I had a lot of fun playing with the decorations.
Ingredients
The ingredients are enough to make a 10-inch cake. The cake contains only eggs, sugar, and flour.
This recipe has no baking powder, so the rising comes from beating the egg whites to a meringue consistency to incorporate air into the batter.
The buttercream is a French buttercream where eggs cook with sugar and flavors in a water bath(bain-marie), then butter is added at the end, little by little. It is a very silky and beautiful buttercream that I personally like a lot.
I chose orange flavor as the holidays were approaching, but lemon is a wonderful flavor to use instead.
The Romanian cakes are usually moist from the syrup we soak the cake with before frosting.
When you start baking, make sure that:
- All your ingredients are at room temperature.
- Also, try to do a mis-en-place, a French term used in professional kitchens for organizing and arranging your ingredients before starting the recipe.
- Use bowls to measure all your ingredients and put them in order. If you have a scale, use it. If you need to chop chocolate or nuts for a recipe, do that during this first stage.
- Separate eggs. Egg whites in a bowl, yolks in a different one.
- Make sure your tools are clean and handy. It makes so much sense to me to do that instead of running around the kitchen for ingredients or tools buried in some cupboard I cannot get to.
Now, you are ready. Let's make the cake. It is easy to make and so much better than something coming from a box.
Tools:
- 10" Springform Pan - I love the springform pans, as it is much easier to work with them, and you can use them not only for baking the cake but also for building a cake that needs to be frozen before decorating. (See here a recipe for a Chocolate mousse and praline entremet)
Enjoy!
More recipes to love
Chocolate Cake With Tart Cherries
Chocolate Cake with Italian Meringue Buttercream
Cream Cheese Lemon Coconut Cake
📖 Recipe
Orange Vanilla French Buttercream Cake
Equipment
Ingredients
Cake batter
- 7 eggs
- 7 tablespoons granulated sugar
- 7 tablespoons all purpose flour or cake flour
- ¼ teaspoon of salt
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Orange/Lemon flavored Buttercream
- 5 large eggs
- ¼ teaspoon of salt
- 1 ⅔ cups granulated sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- lemon zest or orange zest from 1 fruit)
- juice from 1 lemon or 1 orange
- 4 ½ sticks of unsalted butter
Syrup:
- ½ cup water
- ⅓ cup granulated sugar
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350F(180C). Line a 10-inch springform pan with parchment paper and set it aside.
Make the syrup:
- In a small saucepan, place water and sugar to make a syrup. Bring to a boil and simmer for 1-2 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside to cool. This syrup will be used to brush the cake layers.
- In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, beat the eggs with sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy.
- Mix the flour with the salt and baking powder in a separate bowl. Slowly add the flour mixture to the eggs to incorporate. Do not overmix.
- Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for about 40 minutes or until it passes the toothpick test.
- Remove the cake from the pan, running a knife around the edges to release it. Place the cake on a cooling rack and allow it to cool. Slice horizontally in 2-3 layers.
- Orange/Lemon Buttercream
- Pour the eggs into a bowl and add sugar, salt, vanilla, juice, and zest from either lemon or orange(your choice of flavoring). Place the bowl over a pot with water on the stove (Bain-Marie or water bath). Make sure the bowl doesn't touch the simmering water.
- Beat the mixture over the heat until it thickens, like a pudding. Remove it from the heat and allow it to cool.
- Cut the butter small and add it one at a time to your mixture with the mixer (the method is to mix for a second to incorporate, then stop. Add another piece of butter and repeat). Do not overmix, as it can separate.
How to assemble the cake :
- Slice the cake horizontally into 2 or 3 layers. Using a pastry brush, brush each layer with the syrup.
- With a spatula, spread buttercream on the bottom layer and apply the second layer of the cake. Continue with buttercream and another layer of cake. Cover the cake with the rest of the buttercream and decorate to your choice.
- Don't forget to add love and patience! 🙂
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