Menu: Rapunzel's Royal Table on Disney Magic

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.

Why Was My Almond And Orange Blossom Cake Oily?

Full question

I just baked this cake and the taste is very good but I found it too oily! Since the almonds contain so much oil I was wondering if one can not do with less butter?

Our answer

Nigella's Almond And Orange Blossom Cake (from HOW TO EAT) is a fragrant cake that can be made with either regular flour or gluten-free rice flour. The cake also includes butter and ground almonds (almond meal or almond flour), which makes the cake moist and tender.

We are not sure if the cake was made with regular flour or gluten-free flour, though this should not make too much difference. But when you are making the cake, make sure that the butter is not overly soft as if the butter is very soft then it turns to liquid very quickly in the oven, before the rest of the ingredients have set, and occasionally this can lead to a little oil seeping out of the cake. Butter that you are going to cream for cakes should be soft enough that if you press it with a finger then you will leave a small indentation but you should not be able to push your finger all the way into the butter. If the butter is very soft then you may need to refrigerate it for a while to let it firm up slightly.

Can Orange Leaders Make The Hard Choices To Tame A Looming $19M Budget Deficit?

Orange City Council members continue avoiding hard choices to tame a looming and quickly approaching $19 million budget deficit – one that threatens public services including the hiring of police officers and firefighters.

Earlier this month, council members confronted the deficit by making statements about programs they wouldn't cut, which was most top budget items like police and fire budgets. 

Last night, council members avoided the debate for about six hours at their public meeting, waiting until midnight to consider tough choices between hiking taxes and fees or instituting cuts.

At the end of the night, after two hours of discussion, council members ended without voting to institute any cuts and barely any consensus on even when to meet next to finalize decisions.

"We can't afford the level of service that we're providing as a city," said Councilman John Gyllenhammer at Tuesday's city council meeting. "If we are interested, or if we're serious about reducing this budget deficit, we need some level of freeze across the city and we need some allowed vacancy rate in public service."

"This decision is going to be one of the bigger decisions on whether or not we can actually get to where we need to go." 

On the potential chopping block based on discussions and staff reports? Selling off a public library, a host of special events hosted by the city including the 3rd of July celebration, tree trimming, park maintenance and nightly security patrols, police overtime and a potential hiring freeze that could impact public safety.

[Read: City of Orange Faces $19 Million Budget Shortfall, Major Service Cuts Loom]

But leaders are having a hard time agreeing on what exactly they want to make residents live without with Mayor Dan Slater, Councilmembers Jon Dumitru and Kathy Tavoularis reluctant to place a hiring freeze on police officers.

Councilwoman Ana Gutierrez was not present.

Council members did however move forward with direction on how they want to bring in more money to help keep taxpayer coffers afloat.

In play to bump up revenue: potential new city charges to be determined through a fee study, an increase in parking enforcement citations on residents and a sales tax increase that could bring up to $40 million in revenue depending on the rate and if it is approved by voters.

[Read: City of Orange Eyes a Sales Tax Increase While Facing Massive Budget Deficit]

Officials are also eying charging Chapman University and local hospitals fees to help dig themselves out of the hole.

Local leaders are expected to continue Wednesday's early morning discussion on how to address the deficit at a special meeting – possibly on Saturday June 8 – but no date has been confirmed.

They are also expected to discuss a tax measure at their June 11 meeting.

Bumping Up Revenue

Orange leaders are moving forward with a study to implement new fees including credit card fees, business license back taxes and penalties, as well as upping parking enforcement citations

Last night officials voted 6-0 on a $2.5 million 5-year contract for parking enforcement in the city that staff projects could bring in $8-10 million in revenue.

Slater said people have called for enforcement and the revenue the city could make off increased citations on residents was "icing on the cake."

"There's no question that the best part of all is that we're going to come out revenue ahead and I'll bet you it's gonna be closer to $2 million a year, at least initially," he said.

The decision comes as officials in Fullerton – another college town that is also struggling financially – rethink their approach to parking enforcement as working class residents complain about a lack of parking options and some question if the approach is a way to tax them through tickets.

[Read: Will Fullerton Residents Keep Getting Cited for Blocking Street Sweeping?]

Officials also have their eyes on local hospitals and Chapman University for help.

They plan on negotiating with Chapman President Daniele Struppa on ways the university can assist including implementing an over enrollment penalty on the university as well as a life safety fee charged for use of police and fire services on campus.

Police Chief Dan Adams said they get about 100 calls to the university a year. Fire officials also said they regularly respond to a similar amount of calls on campus and the surrounding area. 

Councilwoman Arianna Barrios pushed for the city to start looking into the fees and the over enrollment penalty right away as opposed to waiting to sit down with university representatives.

"We started off this process with no sacred cows and all of a sudden, we've got the biggest cow in front of us and everyone's going 'Oh, no'," she said. "I don't understand. We have to look into this. We have to move forward with some of these things."

City staff said the direction officials took would provide the city with $5.7 million in revenue enhancements.

No Sacred Cows 

Tavoularis called on the city to sell off Taft Library for a one time revenue of $2.7 million dollars to help address the deficit.

"There's no sacred cows," she said as she called on her colleague to sell the library.

Slater, Gyllenhammer and Dumitru said the city should hold off on the sale.

"If we're not willing to do this, and we're not willing to cut public safety, what are we willing to cut – Nothing," said Tavoularis. "If we're not ready to make the tough decisions, I mean, I don't know what the heck we're doing."

Tavoularis did not receive enough support to sell the library.

She, along with Slater and Dumitru, also pushed back on a hiring freeze on police officers.

"I'm just not comfortable with cutting any of those people, even people that are in the pipeline," she said. "I made it clear that I feel that that's crossing the Rubicon." 

Gyllenhammer said while no one wants to cut public safety, they don't have options.

"We can't put this entire deficit on all other departments except for police and fire, it's not going to work, the city's not going to be able to operate," he said.

Will Residents Vote on a Sales Tax Increase?

Discussion on the deficit comes as federal COVID bailout dollars start to runout at local school districts and cities across the county.

It also comes as leaders in neighboring Santa Ana warn of a looming sales tax cliff on the horizon with their own sales tax measure – Measure X – expected to decrease in five years resulting in a projected $30 million loss of revenue. 

On early Wednesday morning, officials kicked off a discussion on a sales tax increase measure to their June 11th meeting.

If sent to the November ballot and voters agree on a 1% sales tax increase, it could mean about $40 million in additional revenue for the city annually.

Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.Org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.

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