Blood Orange Chiffon Cake aka The Muppet

Light as air Blood Orange Chiffon Cake decorated with blood orange icing, Persian fairy floss and pretty edible flowers. A showstopper at your next afternoon tea.

My popular Vanilla Rose Chiffon Cake is my go to when making a chiffon cake. A faultless recipe that produces a tall and light as air cake every time. Being a vanilla cake it’s the perfect base for other flavours and different toppings.

I tweaked this recipe to come up with a Blood Orange Chiffon Cake. The recipe hasn't detoured too far from the original. By simply adding zest from the blood oranges to the batter, the cake takes on a subtle orange flavour.

What appeals to me most about blood oranges is their colour. Sure I love their taste, but it’s so much fun playing artist by colouring creations with blood orange juice. Icing ends up a gorgeous natural pink colour. Of course, the intensity and hue depend on how red the blood oranges are.

How to pick blood oranges

Have you ever purchased blood oranges and been disappointed with the flesh colour when you got home? I know I have. It’s such an anticlimax.

How I pick blood oranges, which I’m not sure is a proven method or just pure luck, is via the colour of their peel. If the blood orange peel has a ruby blush then (for me) it’s a good indication the flesh be gorgeously red. More blush on the peel the bloodier it is inside.

Blood oranges with a ruby blush to the peel have a more intense red flesh.

Importance of adding zest to oil

When reading the recipe you may question why I place the blood orange zest in the oil at the start of the recipe. I’ve mentioned this before and I will say it again.

Oil and butter are fantastic flavour carriers. When creaming butter add your citrus zest at this time as the butter will hold the oils the zest releases and evenly distribute the flavour through your cake.

As we are using oil in this case, it is a similar concept. The zest will infuse into the oil, and in theory, spreading the flavour love that little bit further.

Chiffon Cake Tin

A chiffon cake tin can also be known as an angel food cake tin. The most important thing about your tin is that it has to have a removable bottom. Next important is that it has legs to stand on.

Don't panic if your tind is legless. Place the tin upside down over a bottle. You stick the neck of the bottle in the hole in the centre of the cake tin. The tin I use and have been for years is a Zojoca Living tin. It has done me well.

There was a moment of regret when I was decorating. I’m still debating if I went overboard with the pink Persian fairy floss. I had the perfectly baked blood orange chiffon cake drizzled with blood orange icing. The problem was the floss was making it look like a shaggy pink Jim Henson Muppet.

A set of googly eyes instead of some edible flowers would have transformed the cake into something completely different! Mental note to self, make chiffon cake with googly eyes for Halloween.

I carefully removed some of the floss. Not as easy as it sounds as this stuff just falls apart in your fingers. Once flowers were added the cake’s dynamic changed completely. The result was something quite pretty, not pink Muppet like at all.

Sara xxx

More Chiffon Cake Love

Vanilla Rose Chiffon Cake - a classic beauty
Coffee Marble Chiffon Cake - coffee kick with a drizzle of dark chocolate
Smarties Chiffon Cake - a celebration cake to make you smile