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"The Great British Baking Show"'s Prue Leith Calls Out The 'Biggest Mistake Americans Make When Baking'

Leith "loves Americans" despite their overuse of frosting on cakes

MelMedia/GC Images

Prue Leith in 2019

Too must frosting is the death of desserts, according to Prue Leith.

In an interview with Delish, the Great British Baking Show judge and restaurateur revealed that she believes is the "biggest mistake Americans make while baking."

She was first asked about the major differences between bakers in the U.K. And the U.S. Leith, 84, noted that Americans "like a bit more sugar than" folks in the U.K., and tend to add more frosting than British bakers. "We'd put a smear of frosting, and you'd put an inch of frosting," she said.

Related: Prue Leith Reveals Why She 'Never' Watches 'The Great British Baking Show'

The multi-hyphenate — who is currently judging The Great American Baking Show on Roku — clarified that "too much frosting and too much sugar actually spoils cakes."

Mark Bourdillon/Netflix

Still from the Great British Bake Off

"It makes it more difficult to eat a big slice because it's [a] sugar overload," Leith told Delish. "You can taste the almonds or the strawberries or whatever the flavor is better if it's not overloaded with sugar."

Leith and her fellow judge Paul Hollywood previously spoke about their likes and dislikes when it comes to American cooking during an episode of PEOPLE in 10 ahead of the second season premiere of their American show. Hollywood, 58, said he was shocked by the portion sizes people get served in America.

Related: David Schwimmer Gets a Paul Hollywood Handshake on 'Bake Off' Special: 'Can't Wait to Tell My Daughter'

"I've never seen anything so big!" the celebrity chef told PEOPLE. "In the States, a starter size is like a buffet in the U.K. And a main course would feed a family for a month."

Mark Bourdillon / Love Productions

Still from The Great British Bake Off

Meanwhile, Leith had only good things to say. "I'm rather a fan of America. I love Americans. They're so open and friendly," says Leith. "They're not embarrassed to be slightly over the top."

The second season of The Great American Baking Show is available to stream on Roku devices, the Web, iOS and Android devices, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung TV, and Google TV and other Android TV OS devices.

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Icing + Frosting

Sweet, creamy frosting is an easy (and decadent) way to embellish your favorite dessert. Basic icing is sugar mixed with milk, which is then flavored with cream cheese, cocoa powder and butter or egg whites. The simplest frosting of all, glacé icing, is just powdered sugar and water. We like to drizzle this thin, glossy glaze over homemade scones or coffee cake. There are so many different types of icings and frostings—we love cream-cheese frosting for zucchini and carrot cakes, mascarpone frosting for pumpkin and banana cakes, and chocolate frosting for everything from marble cakes to brownies.

Recipe For Legendary Orange Crunch Cake Brings Back Memories Of Florida's Bubble Room

FARGO — Whenever my family visited my two sisters in Florida, we always insisted on a trip to the Bubble Room restaurant on Captiva Island.

It was a kitschy, wondrous delight, which managed to look like an old movie museum, a Christmas store's going-out-of-business sale and a Rip Taylor fever dream all at the same time.

Toy trains perpetually chugged around elevated tracks lining the walls, faded photos of Hollywood classic movie stars gazed from every available corner and Christmas bubble lights percolated 365 days a year.

"Bubble scouts," aka the grown male and female waiters dressed in scout uniforms, brought us food as whimsical and memorable as the restaurant itself. From the gooey, blue cheese-soaked Bubble Bread to the Eddie Fisherman — delicate, walnut-topped grouper cooked inside a paper bag — we rarely had room left for dessert.

The Bubble Room's iconic Orange Crunch Cake, topped here with Cara Cara oranges, features a rich cream-cheese icing flavored with orange extract.

Tammy Swift / The Forum

But we always ordered it anyway, because leaving the Bubble Room with Saran-wrapped hunks of Bubble Room cake was practically a tourist rite of passage. The most famous of all was the Orange Crunch Cake, an ottoman-sized slab of citrus cake layered with a crunchy almond-brown sugar streusel and topped with a cream cheese frosting tinted as exuberantly orange as Cheese Whiz.

Unfortunately, the bubble burst (at least, temporarily) when Hurricane Ian steamrolled through Florida in September of 2022. The restaurant is still standing, but sustained a lot of damage (imagine all those bubble lights!) and hasn't reopened yet.

My sister, Mabel, brought some measure of comfort during her last trip to North Dakota when she produced recipes copied from the Bubble Room's original cookbook. After hearing the restaurant had produced the book, she checked Amazon for a copy. But since it's no longer in print, it cost $100.

So she found it at a local library, where she proceeded to copy down some of the restaurant's most iconic recipes — including the legendary Orange Crunch Cake.

We were delighted, as we've spent years trying to replicate it. A few "copycat" recipes are floating around on the Internet, but there's no way they are accurate. We scoffed at one widely circulated recipe that claimed the "real" Bubble Room creation used canned frosting. That's downright baking blasphemy. Anyone who has ever endangered a vertebra while picking up one of these manatee-sized cakes knows it must be made with a U-Haul of eggs, cream cheese and butter.

Part of the magic of the Bubble Room's Orange Crunch Cake is the texture provided by the layer of toasted almonds, brown sugar and graham cracker crumbs.

Tammy Swift / The Forum

A quick scan of the recipe showed where it gets its powerful orange punch: lots of orange extract. And I should warn you that orange extract is especially pricey right now, as the world's orange crop was squeezed by drought and disease earlier this year. I had to look for it at several stores. When I finally found it, it cost over $7 for a tiny, 1-ounce bottle, which I used in its entirety for a single cake.

The other surprise is that it uses two box cakes. We had long assumed it was made from some elaborate homemade butter cake recipe, spiked with fresh-squeezed Florida orange juice and real orange zest. Instead, it's all just the sneaky work of Betty Crocker. That sweet talker.

I tried the recipe last weekend. Although I dialed back the orange food coloring, my hands still looked like I had grappled with a recently spray-tanned sumo wrestler in a den filled with Cheetos. But it was worth it, because it tasted exactly like the cake I remember.

Orange Crunch Cake

2 boxes Betty Crocker yellow cake mix

2 tablespoons orange extract

Orange juice

Follow directions on box, but replace water with orange juice and add extract.

Crunch Mix: 

1 ½ cups brown sugar

1 ½ cups graham cracker crumbs

½ cup toasted almonds

Mix ingredients together and press into bottom of three 9-inch well-oiled (or parchment-lined) cake pans. Pour equal amounts of cake mix over each crunch layer and bake in preheated 350-degree oven as directed. (It may take slightly longer than directions on box because the cakes are thicker. I baked my rounds for about 32 minutes and removed them when a toothpick inserted in center came out clean.) Place on wire racks to cool for at least 20 minutes.

Icing:

1 ½ boxes powdered sugar (I wasn't sure what size box was used, so wound up using a whole 32-ounce bag plus nearly half of another same-sized bag)

16 ounces cream cheese, softened

1 pound butter, room temperature

½ tablespoon yellow food coloring + 3 drops red food coloring (I just used orange food coloring)

1 tablespoon orange extract

2 seedless oranges, thinly sliced

Beat together cream cheese and butter until fluffy. Slowly mix in powdered sugar, sampling until you reach desired sweetness and consistency. Add food coloring. Place first layer of cooled cake on cake platter with crunch layer side facing up. Top with frosting before adding second layer with crunch side down. Top with more frosting and add third layer, with crunch side down. Garnish with orange slices.

Note: The original recipe suggested topping the frosting with even more sweetness: a jar of heated orange marmalade combined with juice from one lemon. I skipped this step as this confection will already make your pancreas work overtime.

For 35 years, Tammy Swift has shared all stages of her life through a weekly personal column. Her first "real world" job involved founding and running the Bismarck Tribune's Dickinson bureau from her apartment. She has worked at The Forum four different times, during which she's produced everything from food stories and movie reviews to breaking news and business stories. Her work has won awards from the Minnesota and North Dakota Newspaper Associations, the Society for Professional Journalists and the Dakotas Associated Press Managing Editors News Contest. As a business reporter, she gravitates toward personality profiles, cottage industry stories, small-town business features or anything quirky. She can be reached at tswift@forumcomm.Com.

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