[Campfire Recipes] Bake a Cake in an Orange

We often celebrate birthdays with group camping trips and love to try making new foods over the campfire so when we heard about the idea to bake cakes in an orange I gave it a shot.

The new spin on these was that we made the cake batter ahead of time. We had a vegan friend on the trip so I made batter with egg substitute and apple sauce, but this ended up working in our favor - turns out vegan cake batter is much less of a hazard as something with raw eggs.

Let's get started...

Step 1: Ingredients

There are a bunch of different ways you can make cake, so I recommend using one you know and like. I made the cake vegan by using egg replacer (see the photo for the box) and substituted the oil out with applesauce in a 1:1 ratio. The cake was a box mix - nothing fancy here!

Get as many oranges as you have people :-)

Step 2: Prep Your Orange

Take your orange and cut it about 1/3 of the way down. A simple slice through the skin will allow you to separate the 'lid' from the rest of the orange and then you can work the flesh of the orange out. I used a spoon to help remove the insides of the bottom.

At the end of this step, you should have a top and bottom without any orange fruit left inside. Don't worry - the cake will still absorb the delicious orange flavor from the peel!

Step 3: Mix Up the Batter

As before, mix up your favorite cake batter. Chocolate + orange? Sounds delicious. Vanilla and orange is a winner. Be creative and use any favorite recipe. The benefit of substituting out any dairy is that you can rest easier about it spoiling if you aren't making the cakes right away and it's much easier to prep cake batter at home than in the camp ground!

Step 4: Fill Your Orange

Right before you get to bake the oranges in the fire, add the batter into the oranges. I like to leave a little room as the cake will overflow otherwise.

Step 5: Cover, Wrap, and Bake

Put the lid back onto the orange and wrap it tightly in aluminum foil. Once you have a good cooking fire, add these to the fire and let them bake! The timing will depend on the heat of your fire, so try to gauge accordingly and adjust your timing, but somewhere about 10 minutes is average. If it's vegan you don't have to worry about eggs being cooked so you just want to make sure the batter has firmed up.

Step 6: Add Candles and Eat!

Remove the oranges from the fire, pull the tops off, toss some candles in (if you're using them to celebrate a birthday like we do!), and eat!

They'll likely be pretty hot coming off the fire, so maybe sing a few rounds of 'Happy Birthday' to buy yourselves some time ;-)