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.
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.
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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.
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
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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
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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
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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.
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