Blood Orange Sour Cream Cakes

Wonderfully moist sour cream orange cakes, made in mini bundts and finished with a gorgeous pink glaze from blood oranges. This is a stunning and easy recipe! 

The sweet pink color in the frosting comes from blood oranges. They are just so gorgeous when you cut them in two, fiery shades of orange and yellow, no two alike.

It makes for a whimsical glaze, don't you think? I always like using natural foods to create colors in my baking. It just makes sense. Like this almond cake with a raspberry glaze, simply stunning.

Blood oranges vs regular ones

It's subtle.

Here the blood variety is pretty much the same in shape as the regular ones (image below) we use for juice, but the inside is bursting with dark oranges and yellows and maybe reds with an ochre base, very like a ball of burning flames.

They are quite sweet, and though many say sweeter than regular ones, I find them to have a slight acid berry undertone. Really great oranges, I just love them. The color alone makes them taste better or what? haha.

Anyway, they are wonderful and worth buying and trying.

This particular cake is one of my favorites, a take on the lemon-lime pound cake, one of the best recipes in its kind, hands down.

Moist, sweet, gorgeous tight crumb, easy to make and a good base to let your imagination fly, with citruses or spices or nuts...

I just had to use these blood oranges in a simple sour cream cake to bring out their flavor and make use of that gorgeous red juice in the glaze. Who can blame me?

Sour cream in cakes

Sour cream makes for a denser cake with a tighter, richer crumb.

It cuts wonderfully and I personally like them for loaf cakes, since they remain moist for a few days and can be toasted easily (this is best done with a day old cake).

It also gives it a golden crust and in some cases cuts through some of the sweetness, due to the acid in it. It really is cream with acidic content, a by-product from the days when fresh milk had its own layer of cream, and all of it was used for different purposes.

Top tips 

• Oranges: the name implies using blood oranges of course, but this is a great orange cake recipe to make year-round. The color of the blood oranges gives the batter a funny hue (image above) but the result after baking is wonderful. 
• Pans: I used a small mini bundt cakes pan (image below). You can make regular mini bundts (as in the Coffee Chocolate Bundts) and the recipe will yield about 12 cakes. Or make a good old large bundt like our vanilla poppy seed bundt. 
• Storing: the unglazed cakes freeze wonderfully, well wrapped. 

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