Cranberry Orange Bundt Cake

Christmas is less than two weeks away. I’m so excited! I am flying home, and I hope the weather cooperates. One year there was a serious snowstorm, and I ended up driving down to Raleigh, North Carolina from DC to fly to Utah. I no longer own a car, so that’s not really an option anymore.

Just to make things a little more stressful, I am planning on going to New York the weekend before Christmas. I will be one of a bazillion other tourists, but I want to experience New York during the holidays. I am going to bus to New York Saturday morning, return to DC Sunday night, work Monday, and fly out Monday night. Here’s hoping to good weather!

Is there anything more Christmassy than cranberries and orange? I have recently read several blog posts involving these ingredients. I had cranberry sauce for a Thanksgiving recipe idea that never came to fruition. A quick google search brought up this interesting recipe from Taste of Home. I found it intriguing because it doesn’t use any eggs. Instead, you add a cup of mayonnaise. Weird, right? You can’t taste mayonnaise, but it makes the cake incredibly moist.

The ingredients are 1 ½ cups sugar, 1 cup mayonnaise, 1/3 cup orange juice, 1 tablespoon orange zest, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 3 cups all-purpose flour, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1 14 ounce can whole-berry cranberry sauce. The glaze requires 1 cup powdered sugar and 1 to 2 tablespoons orange juice.

I combined the mayonnaise and sugar.

I added the orange juice, lemon juice, and orange zest. The original recipe called for orange extract, but I didn’t want to purchase an entire bottle of orange extract for one cake. I used lemon juice instead. That probably isn’t an appropriate substitute, but it worked out.

In another bowl, I combined the flour, salt, and baking soda.  I gradually added the dry ingredients to the sugar mixture. I stirred after each addition. When all the flour was added, the batter is very dry. I was a little worried, but the cranberry sauce adds liquid, and the cake was moist.

I then stirred in the cranberry sauce. The cranberry sauce made the cake a little pink, but I didn’t find the baked cake pink at all.

I poured the batter into a buttered bundt pan and baked it for 55 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

After it cooled for 20 minutes, I turned it over onto a wire rack completely cool. I had a cake malfunction. A chunk of the cake didn’t release from the pan. I pieced it bake together, but it suffered ascetically. I should have let it cool for only ten minutes before trying to remove it from the pan. Perhaps I should have floured the pan as well.

After it had cooled, I made the glaze. I slowly added the orange juice into the powdered sugar.

Once the glaze was at an appropriate consistency, I drizzled it over the cake.

I think I added too much orange juice. It’s a fine line between not enough liquid and too much liquid when making a glaze.

This cake was charming and appetizing! It was supper moist. The orange and cranberry pared nicely; the quantities of each were perfect because you could taste both. The chewy little cranberries speckled throughout the cake were delightful. Minus the patch job, it is an elegant cake as well.