Hello guys and ghouls! Today is the final installment of my Witchy Wednesday series and I’ve had a lot of fun coming up with vintage Halloween inspiration for you all. Today, we do something a little bit new and exciting which is testing out a vintage recipe. Now I love baking but I’m definitely not Martha Stewart level so feel free to have a giggle at my expense. When I was researching vintage Halloween recipes, I was keeping my eye out for one from the 1950’s and although I found some great images, sometimes the writing was very difficult to read and I couldn’t find the original source and most of the time it just seemed like a lovely advert that you then had to mail in to get the recipe. Eventually, I stumbled upon this 1970’s Halloween Double Orange Cake and thought it was really cute and quite simple to make. So that’s what we are going to do! Aprons on!

If you have trouble reading the recipe, I have written it out for you here with my own notes that I found helpful whilst creating this cake. I also only wanted to make the main cake without the mini pumpkins to match as it just seemed like a lot of cake to make before I was to go travelling and I didn’t want to waste food.

Double Orange Cake 
X2 packet of Orange Jelly
X2 cups of boiling water
X2 packets of Orange Cake Mix
1 1/3 cups of Vegetable Shortening (I used Copha because I’m Australian but you can still use Crisco)
X6 eggs
These ingredients will be divided into two cakes.

1. To begin, divide the recipe as you will be making two cakes. Dissolve jelly in boiling water, cool slightly. Combine with cake mix, shortening (melted into an oil), and eggs in a mixing bowl. Beat at medium speed for 4 minutes. Pour batter into a greased and floured Gugelhupf/bundt pan and bake for 60-65 minutes at 180 degrees Celcius (350F).

2. Repeat the above recipe to make the second cake.

3. When both cakes are baked and cooled, level them off with a flat edge, frost and stack them on top of each other to make one large round “pumpkin”. The hole of the Gugelhupf pan should be at the top. Frost the outside with orange-flavored and orange-tinted buttercream icing. Add facial decorations using black buttercream (I used an icing pen to save time).

Now the recipe calls for you to shove a ‘witch doll’ into the top hole. It reminds me so much of My Big Fat Greek Wedding when the Miller family gifted the bundt cake and the others commented: “there’s a hole in this cake”. The next time the cake is shown, it has a flower pot shoved into the hole and someone excitedly yells “you fixed it!”. This scene always makes me laugh because I grew up eating bunt cakes and always wondered what’s the point of having a hole in the middle of the cake. I personally didn’t want to shove a doll into my cake so I finished off my cake by creating an edible stem and leaves out of fondant.

So how did I go creating this vintage cake and of course, how did it taste?
The first cake ended in disaster. Although my pan was non-stick and I used extra butter, the cake stuck to the pan and it fell apart. Great. However, when I tasted the damaged cake it was absolutely delicious so that’s a really positive things to note. I continued making the second cake and this time added even more butter with a thin layer of flour to the pan and only baked it for about 45 minutes. That’s the way to go!
Once the actual cakes were cooled, creating the pumpkin was actually really fun. I coloured my butercream orange and added some orange flavouring, then smoothed the edges to create pumpkin ridges. I know it’s not perfect but to be honest, I like how ‘home-made’ the cake in the original recipe looked and thought mine turned out pretty good regardless of all the issues I had with the actual baking.
This cake was absolutely delicious! It didn’t last very long in the house and all the friends I brought a slice to loved it. I even gave it to my neice and nephew who thought it was yummy even though it wasn’t chocolate and had “weird specks in it”… poppy seeds, they are poppy seeds kids. I enjoyed my cake with a cup of tea and didn’t find it too sweet. I liked how the orange flavour came through without it reminding me of citrus cleaning products that some artifical orange flavours can do. I would highly recommend this cake if you wanted to host your own Halloween party or wanted to try a vintage recipe.

 

 

My ‘Witchy Wednesday’ series is officially over and I’m kind of sad to see it finish. I really enjoyed planning and creating all my content for the series and although it was extra work on top of two blogs and a video to create every week, I had a lot of fun. I am thinking about creating a similar series for Christmas so let me know if that’s something you might like.

Note: This is not a sponsored post. All opinions and thoughts expressed are solely my own and not influenced in any way.