FARGO — Whenever my family would visit my two sisters in Florida, we made a point of going to the Bubble Room restaurant on Captiva Island.
It was a kitschy, magical delight, part old film museum, part closing-out Christmas sale, part Rip Taylor fever dream.
Toy trains ran constantly on elevated tracks along the walls, faded photos of classic Hollywood movie stars could be seen from every corner, and Christmas bubble lights twinkled 365 days a year.
“Bubble Scouts”—grown-up male and female waiters dressed in Scout uniforms—brought us food that was as eccentric and memorable as the restaurant itself, from bubble bread drenched in sticky blue cheese to Eddie Fisherman, a delicate grouper cooked in a paper bag and topped with walnuts, leaving us barely room for dessert.
Tammy Swift / The Forum
But we always ordered it, because leaving the Bubble Room with a saran-wrap-wrapped chunk of Bubble Room Cake was practically a rite of passage for tourists. The most famous was the Orange Crunch Cake, an ottoman-sized citrus cake layered with crispy almond-brown sugar streusel and topped with a cream cheese frosting dyed as vibrant orange as Cheese Whiz.
Unfortunately, the bubble burst (at least temporarily) when Hurricane Ian struck Florida in September 2022. The restaurant still stands, but it was heavily damaged (imagine the Bubble Light!) and has yet to reopen.
My sister, Mabel, found some solace during a recent trip to North Dakota by copying a recipe from the original Bubble Room cookbook, and when she heard the restaurant had published the book, she looked for it on Amazon, only to find that it was no longer in print and cost $100.
So she found it at her local library and transcribed some of the restaurant’s most iconic recipes, including the legendary Orange Crunch Cake.
We were so pleased, because we’ve been trying to recreate this cake for years. There are several “copycat” recipes floating around the internet, but none of them can be accurate. One widely circulated recipe claimed that the “real” Bubble Room cake uses canned frosting, but we scoffed at that – it’s pure baking sacrilege. If you’ve ever risked your spine while lifting this manatee-sized cake, you know this cake must have been made with eggs, cream cheese, and butter from a U-Haul.
Tammy Swift / The Forum
A quick look at the recipe revealed that the source of this recipe’s intense orange flavor is a large amount of orange extract. And I should warn you that orange extract is especially expensive right now, after drought and disease decimated orange crops around the world earlier this year. I had to hunt around a few stores for it, and when I finally found it, it was over $7 for a small one-ounce bottle. I used the whole thing for one cake.
Another surprise is the use of two boxed cakes. For the longest time, we assumed this cake was made with an elaborate homemade butter cake recipe, with fresh-squeezed Florida orange juice and real orange zest. But it’s all the clever work of Betty Crocker, that sweet schmoozer.
I tried this recipe last weekend, and even though I forego the orange food coloring, my hands felt like I’d wrestled a newly sunburned sumo wrestler in a Cheetos-filled hideout. But it was worth it, because the cake tasted exactly like the one I remembered.
Orange Crunch Cake
2 boxes of Betty Crocker Yellow Cake Mix
2 tablespoons orange extract
orange juice
Follow the directions on the box, but replace the water with orange juice and add the extract.
Crunch Mix:
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
1/2 cup toasted almonds
Mix ingredients and press into the bottoms of three generously greased (or lined with baking paper) 9-inch cake pans. Pour an equal amount of cake mix into each crunchy layer and bake in a preheated 350° oven according to instructions. (Because the cakes are thick, they may take a little longer than the box says; I baked my round cakes for about 32 minutes and removed them when a toothpick inserted into the center came out clean.) Place on a wire rack to cool for at least 20 minutes.
Icing:
1 1/2 boxes of powdered sugar (I wasn’t sure what size box they used so I used one 32 ounce bag and roughly half of another bag of the same size).
16 ounces cream cheese, softened
1 pound butter, at room temperature
1/2 tablespoon yellow food coloring + 3 drops red food coloring (I used orange food coloring)
1 tablespoon orange extract
2 seedless oranges, thinly sliced
Beat the cream cheese and butter until fluffy. Gradually add the powdered sugar, beating until desired sweetness and consistency is reached. Add the food coloring. Place the first layer of cooled cake, crunchy side up, on a cake plate. Spread frosting on top, then add the second layer, crunchy side down. Spread more frosting and add the third layer, crunchy side down. Garnish with orange slices.
Notes: The original recipe suggested adding an extra sweetener to the frosting — a jar of warmed orange marmalade mixed with the juice of one lemon — but because this treat alone is taxing on the pancreas, I omitted this step.
