Orange Cake with Fruit Tingles Icing

Updated note: For those of you who saw my Fizzy Candy Cake printed in Woman's World Magazine, you might notice that they changed my recipe to use Pop Rocks in the icing. If they had asked my opinion I wouldn't have recommended that, as it is meant to be a fizzy sherbert icing, not a popping candy icing. The recipe below includes suggestions for more suitable candies that are similar to Fruit Tingles, like Bottle Caps, SweeTarts or Smarties.
My fiancé A loves any food that is super sour. He sucks on lemons. This must be part of the whole opposite attracts thing, since I'm about as happy to suck on lemons as he is to eat a scone. He's very picky about his sweets, but one of his favourite lollies are Fruit Tingles. I'm not sure if anyone outside of Australia has had these, but they are these tart, pastel-coloured tablet candies, which have fizzy sherbet powder in them, hence the tingly part of Fruit Tingles. These are one of the many sweets that we have to bring along with us on any car or plane trip, in fact I recently pulled out one of my hand-luggage bags and found a fruit tingle rolling around the bottom of the bag. Also A insists that only the multi-coloured fruit tingle in the pack (there's usually only one in each pack) is THE fruit tingle, and none of the other colours should be called fruit tingles. But whatever, I crushed up all the different colours to make this Fruit Tingles Icing, isn't it pretty??? It is. It's pretty, and very tingly. That might sound a bit wrong but it tastes so right heehee...

I've been having a bit of a drought in baking inspiration recently. I'd been sort of toying with the idea of doing an orange sherbet cake but I couldn't quite figure out how to make it my own. Then Regex Man suggested that I make something with Fruit Tingles, remembering the Fruit Tingles Milkshake he once had Bells Milk Bar. It had to be done! I immediately decided to do a layered orange cake with a butter icing that had crushed up fruit tingles mixed into it. A bit of research also happened to find me these amazing fruit tingle macarons on Flickr which I think is just as awesome an idea. But I really wanted to slather an entire cake with loads of this fruit tingle icing. Don't worry if you can't get Fruit Tingles where you live, any fizzy hard candies will do. Suze tells me that the US equivalent is Bottle Caps or Smarties (not the chocolate covered candy with the same name) or SweeTarts, but since I haven't had these myself I can't say for sure that they're the same or similar enough. (Or Barratt's Refreshers for those in the UK?)

Since I know that icing a layered cake is always going to be messy and will take me ages to get it nice and neat, I was glad to have a super easy cake recipe that I could whip up in a few minutes. Stephanie Alexander's orange tea cake has got to be one of the easiest, yummiest cake recipes I've ever used. It's the same recipe that I ended up adapting to use for my foolproof cupcake recipe. You literally throw the ingredients into the food processor, whizz it up and bake it. I adapted it in this recipe so it could be baked as three separate cake layers, but you could always bake it in one deep cake tin and slice it up. I also reduced the amount of sugar since it was going to be covered in heaps of icing. I used salted butter in the icing which stops it from being so sweet that it makes your teeth hurt. But I wouldn't make this cake if you're scared of sugar or butter. There's a LOT of sugar and butter in the icing. Though if you're really scared of butter and/or sugar you probably shouldn't be reading my blog most of the time.

The icing is most definitely the star of this cake. I've been making a lot of awesome simple butter icing recipes recently, they're the ones that I love to eat on cakes and they're the easiest to get right. The little nubbins of Fruit Tingle bits give this icing that beautiful speckled pastel coloured look, and add the sour fizzy sherbet flavour that A is so fond of. It goes really well with the orange cake, and you could easily adapt this recipe into a cupcake recipe too. I am pretty sure this recipe would be a winner at a birthday party, especially if the kids (or adults) love Fruit Tingles as much as A does.

In other random news, I was lucky enough to be asked by SBS Food to be one of their Featured Foodies on their website this month. They've done great features on some of my favourite food bloggers in the past and you can see mine here.

And OH MY GOD there's even a (very old) photo of me. But at least I'm not posing with Tupperware boobies or anything, which has happened on another blog before and shall not be mentioned again. Anyway go check it out!

Fruit Tingles Cake (Orange Cake with Fizzy Sherbet Icing)
(makes one 3-layered 20cm round cake, cake recipe adapted from Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion)
For the cake:
1 1/2 large oranges
3 eggs
165g (about 1.5 sticks) unsalted butter
3/4 cup caster sugar (superfine white sugar)
300g (approx 2 cups) self-raising flour

For the icing:
350g butter (I like to use salted butter for this)
750g (about 6 cups) icing sugar, sifted
4 rolls (about 140g) Fruit tingles, or any other fizzy tablet candies like Bottle Caps or Smarties (not the chocolate covered candy with the same name), SweeTarts or Barratt's Refreshers, plus an extra roll to decorate on top if you wish

Preheat oven to 190°C (375°F) (if fan-forced use 180°C (350°F)) and grease, line the base and dust with flour three 20cm round baking tins. If you're like me and only own one tin, you can re-use the tin and bake three cakes, one after the other. Zest and juice orange (I ended up with about 1/2 cup of juice). Combine all cake ingredients in a food processor and blend for 2 minutes. If you have extra time and are worried about over-mixing the flour like me, blend the orange juice and zest, butter, sugar and eggs together first for one minute, then add the flour and blend for another minute. If you don't have a food processor, cream butter and sugar together using an electric beater until light and smooth. Add eggs at a time and beat in well. Add the juice, zest and flour and quickly mix until combined, avoid overbeating the flour. Split the batter into three equal portions (I used a scale to measure it exactly), and pour into prepared tin(s) and smooth with a spatula. Bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes or until golden and a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Cool in tin for 5 minutes and then carefully remove and cool cake on wire rack completely. (Cakes can be made a day ahead and wrapped in cling film in the fridge overnight before icing)

When all 3 cakes are completely cool, start preparing the icing by removing the salted butter from the fridge 30 mins before starting. Place butter in a large mixing bowl and beat until smooth and fluffy with an electric mixer on high. Gradually add icing sugar with the mixer on medium, then when it is combined beat on high until light and fluffy. You may need to adjust the amount of icing sugar to obtain the right consistency of icing, you want it to be smooth but not holding its shape, not runny. Crush fruit tingles in a food processor or by smashing it up in a zip lock bag and beat crushed lollies into the icing until even. Sandwich the three cakes with an even layer of icing between them, crumb coat cake and then chill for about half an hour, then cover then cover the entire cake in another layer of icing, smoothing out with a spatula or palette knife. Top cake with extra fruit tingles and chill for about 20 mins to set the icing. Serve at room temperature, can be stored in an airtight container in the fridge for several days.