Recipe: Yellow Spice Cake with Orange Cream Cheese Icing

On Wednesday, I baked this cake for the Teacher Conference Dinner at Red Pine. It caused me to forget about playgroup. Somehow I am losing some of my multi-tasking skills - or maybe I'm just losing my memory.

The cake is another from James McNair's Cakes
I took his Yellow Cake recipe and used the variation to make it a spice cake.

2 1/2 cups plus 2T cake flour
1T Baking Powder
3/4 t. salt
2 sticks unsalted butter at room temp
2 cups sugar (1 white, 1 brown)
6 egg yolks at room temp
2 eggs room temp
2 t vanilla
1 cup buttermilk room temp
2 t. cinnamon
1t. allspice
1/2 t. ground cloves
1/2 t. nutmeg (freshly ground if you have it)

Sift dry ingredients several times. Beat butter until creamy, add sugars and beat until very light and fluffy (about 5 minutes with scraping the sides). Slowly drizzle in eggs while mixing at med. then add vanilla. Set mixture to lowest setting and alternate adding wet and dry ingredients - make sure you scrape the sides and the bottom of the bowl really well.

Bake at 350 in two 9 inch greased and floured pans for 30 minutes.


I split my cake into four layers and filled with the icing. I just made up the icing, but here is about what I did.

Beat 1 stick room temp butter and 1 block (8 oz.) room temp cream cheese until fluffy. Add 2 t. vanilla and the zest of one orange. Add about 1/2 cup or more of sour cream and then start adding powdered sugar until the frosting is thick enough to spread and hold. Note: this cake will need a crumb coat as the cake has a very delicate texture.