This orange olive oil cake involves 0 zesting, 0 juicing, 0 mixing, pretty much 0 effort of any kind. You just throw an entire orange in a food processor!

Okay, okay… it’s like 3 steps more complicated than that (one of them being “do not wash the food processor,” which hardly counts). But it’s seriously the easiest cake of all time. Here’s how the batter is made:

1. Blend the dry ingredients + oil in the food processor. Set aside.
2. Don’t wash that food processor!!
3. Blend an entire orange in the food processor.
4. Add the mixture from step 1 back into the food processor to blend with the orange purée.

That’s it! It’s as easy as a cake can be, but its shortcuts are actually science-approved. I’ll get into it below, or jump to the recipe if you don’t need to see the math.

Things I love about this orange olive oil cake:

1. The technique yields a tender, moist crumb (more on that in the next section)
2. All the orange flavor comes from a whole orange. It’s a win-win, because you get a ton of orange flavor without any zesting or juicing. If orange marmalade can do it, so can cake.
3. You don’t have to wash the food processor until after you’re done baking. I’ve very carefully sequenced this recipe so that you start with the dry ingredients and end with the wet, which means you don’t have to stop to rinse it out or anything.
4. It’s SO GOOD. Idk what else to say about that. Bold orange flavor. Olive oil for a lovely texture and nutty, aromatic flavor. It’s just the best.

How to make (really good!) cake in a food processor:

So it’s obvious why a food processor would simplify the process of making cake batter. But how can we make sure our orange olive oil cake tastes great too? We certainly don’t want a shortcut that will yield a mediocre cake. Here’s what we’re going to do instead:

1. Reverse-creaming

The biggest danger with making a cake recipe in a food processor is gluten development. A food processor will tend to use way too much power to bring everything together. Reverse-creaming to the rescue!

Reverse-creaming is simply when you take all the dry ingredients and mix them with oil or butter before introducing a single wet ingredient. By coating the flour in oil, it becomes difficult to overdevelop the gluten. This means our crumb will turn out moist, tender, and fluffy (instead of gluey, stodgy, and/or tough).

Reverse-creaming makes it more difficult to overwork the gluten, but it’s not impossible. That brings me to my next point.

2. Pulsing, rather than letting it run

Once you add the flour/oil mixture to the orange purée, it’s very important that you pulse rather than letting the machine run. My food processor took 7 pulses to bring everything together. You just want to make sure it’s homogenous, and at that point, stop. If you continue letting it run, the final texture of the cake will turn out gluey.

This is certainly theoretically true. But I actually put it to the test one day in pursuit of an even more streamlined recipe, at which point I experienced the limits of reverse-creaming firsthand. Had I not reverse-creamed, my cake would have been totally inedible. But overworking my batter, even with reverse-creaming, my cake was a tad gluey in texture.

Don’t let it happen to you! Pulse, don’t run.

A few last tips:

1. Weight/volume (and how to get that orange sizing right!)

Baking works better with weight measurements, but you can use cups to make this recipe if you need to. I always include both.

The main problem with baking without weighing your ingredients: flour is notoriously tricky to measure by the cup (and getting it even slightly wrong in a baking recipe will dramatically affect the outcome). This isn’t true of just this recipe, but of all baking recipes. However! If you’ve been baking with volume your whole life, you’re probably cool with that. And if so, that’s cool with me.

Unfortunately, this particular recipe introduces a new variable: the 1 whole orange. I specify “medium” because the oranges I used to develop this recipe seemed “medium” to me. But that description is totally subjective.

If you can weigh your orange, great! You’re all set. If you don’t have a scale, you’ll need to eyeball it and cross your fingers. I showed a 230g (about 8 oz) orange next to my Airpod case for scale in the video that goes with this recipe. Or if you’re really worried about it, you can measure the purée after blending. 230g is almost exactly 1 cup of orange purée.

2. Seriously, don’t wash that food processor.

I can’t tell you how many times I’m making a recipe, throw the food processor in the sink along with a bunch of nasty dishes, and then realize I still needed to use it.

PSA, don’t make yourself wash it twice! Follow the steps as-written and breeze on through without a rinse.

3. How to use a blender instead of a food processor:

I don’t recommend just using the following technique in a Vitamix or something (it will certainly become overworked). But here’s my workaround, using a blender:

• Complete step 2 by hand in a mixing bowl with a whisk (mix together the dry ingredients and oil).
• Complete step 3 in a blender (purée your orange).
• Pour the orange purée into the mixing bowl and stir together by hand.

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