High Altitude Cardamom Orange Christmas Sprinkle Cake

This festive Christmas sprinkle cake features a high altitude recipe for soft and fluffy cake scented with ground cardamom and fresh orange zest, with brown butter frosting and Christmas sprinkles. You’ll love the flavor of the cardamom orange cake paired with the brown butter, and the colorful sprinkles add such a pretty touch for a Christmas birthday party or holiday celebration.

You might also love this red velvet sheet cake with powdered sugar snowflakes, cardamom eggnog cake, and gingerbread cake with mascarpone buttercream.

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Why You’ll Love This Recipe

Easy to Decorate. This Christmas sprinkle cake is a fun cake to decorate with lots and lots of festive and colorful holiday sprinkles. You can just do a few sprinkles, or cover the cake with sprinkles. If you’re using nonpareils or sparkling sugar, you can just toss those at the cake and see where they land. But for the larger sprinkles that I used, I did need to hand place them using tweezers.

Soft, Fluffy and Moist. This cardamom orange cake is based on my popular high altitude vanilla cake recipe. It’s a versatile cake recipe, and I simply added fresh orange zest and ground cardamom for a holiday flavor.

High Altitude Tested. I develop all the recipes on my site for Denver’s altitude of 5,280 feet. If you’re at a lower or higher elevation, please see my FAQs for guidance on adjusting recipes for your altitude.

See the recipe card at the end of the post for the full ingredients list and instructions.

Ingredients

Cake

• Granulated Sugar. Adds sweetness and moisture.
• Orange Zest. Use freshly grated orange zest and rub it into the sugar until fragrant, to extract the most flavor.
• Cake Flour. Makes a softer, fluffier cake than if you used all-purpose flour.
• Baking Powder. Leavening agent, so the cake rises as it bakes.
• Cardamom. Ground cardamom adds a warm, distinctive flavor that’s delicious in baked goods, especially during the winter months. It’s a very popular spice in Scandinavian countries, particularly when paired with almond. For a less forward flavor, use half the amount of cardamom called for.
• Salt. Balances the sweetness and enhances flavors.
• Egg + Egg White. Adds moisture, strength and structure to the cake.
• Buttermilk. The acidity in buttermilk makes a very tender cake. If you don’t have buttermilk, you can simply use whole milk and add a teaspoon of white distilled vinegar.
• Butter + Vegetable Oil. Flavor and moisture.
• Vanilla Extract. Flavor.

Frosting

• Butter. You can use salted or unsalted butter, just omit the extra salt if your butter is salted. Browning the butter first makes this buttercream really special, giving it a very rich flavor.
• Powdered Sugar. Sweetens and thickens the buttercream.
• Meringue Powder. Adds stability and improves the texture.
• Salt. Balance the sweetness and enhances the flavor of the butter.
• Vanilla Extract. Flavor.
• Milk or Cream. When you brown butter, the water evaporates. So brown butter frosting is typically a little dryer than my usual buttercream recipe. Because of this, I always add some liquid back in with milk or cream.
• Assorted Christmas Sprinkles. See the FAQs section below for sources on the sprinkles I used for my Christmas sprinkle cake.

Instructions

Bake the Cake.

• Preheat the oven to 350 F, and position a rack in the center of the oven. Lightly spray the bottoms of three 6-inch cake pans with non-stick baking spray.
• In a bowl, measure the sugar then rub the orange zest into the sugar until fragrant. Sift in the flour, baking powder, cardamom and salt, and whisk to combine.
• Add the egg, egg white, buttermilk, melted butter, oil, and vanilla, and whisk just until combined and mostly smooth, but don’t over-mix.
• Divide the batter between the cake pans. Bake the cakes for about 18-22 minutes, until a cake tester comes out clean, and the tops spring back when gently touched.
• Set the pans on a cooling rack, cover loosely with a clean kitchen towel, and cool completely before frosting.

Make the Brown Butter.

• In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Continue to cook the butter, swirling the pan occasionally. It will hiss and spatter a bit, as the water evaporates, and the milk solids settle onto the bottom of the pan. When it’s nearly ready, a layer of foam will form on top of the butter, and if you nudge the foam aside, you’ll see nutty, golden brown milk solids on the bottom of the pan (if they turn dark brown or black, you’ve gone too far and burned the butter). The browning process might take about 5-10 minutes.

• Remove the pan from the heat and use a spatula to scrape all the browned milk solids off the bottom of the pan. Pour the browned butter and all the browned bits into a bowl.
• Let cool until the butter returns to a spreadable solid consistency. To speed this up, put the bowl in the refrigerator for 1-2 hours and stir the butter every 20 minutes or so until it’s firmed up but still spreadable. (I usually brown the butter in the evening, then just let it sit at room temperature until the next day, when I’m ready to frost the cake.)

Make the Frosting.

• In the bowl of your stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the cooled brown butter for 1 minute until smooth.
• In a separate bowl, combine the powdered sugar, meringue powder and salt. With the mixer on low, add the powdered sugar mixture by spoonfuls, then the vanilla. Increase the speed to medium (#4/6 on a Kitchen Aid mixer), and beat for about 5 minutes until light and fluffy, scraping the bowl several times. The process of browning the butter removes the water from the butter, so this buttercream will be too dry unless you add back in some liquid. So while you’re beating the buttercream, add in the milk or cream a tablespoon at a time, until you’re happy with the consistency for spreading onto your cake. Turn the speed down to “stir” and mix for 1 minute to pop large air bubbles.
• Remove the cooled cakes from the pan. Fill and frost the cake layers with the buttercream, then cover the cake with a thin crumb coat of frosting. Chill for 30 minutes to set the crumb coat.
• Add a few tablespoons of sprinkles (such as nonpareils and quins/confetti sprinkles) to the remaining buttercream, and frost the cake all over with a final coat of buttercream.
• Before the frosting crusts over, decorate the cake all over with more sprinkles. (I hand placed every sprinkle on my cake using tweezers.)

Recipe Variations

8 or 9 inch Layer Cake

I made a more petite 6-inch layer cake for today’s design, which yields about 8 servings. For a larger cake that yields 16-20 servings, you can double the recipe and divide the cake batter between three 8-inch or two 9-inch pans. You don’t need to double the frosting recipe, but you’ll likely need to increase it by 30% (multiply the ingredients by 1.333).

Sheet Cake

This Christmas sprinkle cake would also look adorable as a sheet cake, and is actually what I had originally intended to make, before I decided to do a layer cake instead. For a sheet cake, double the cake recipe and bake the batter in a 9×13 inch baking pan for about 30-35 minutes. You do not need to increase the frosting recipe.

Be sure to read all of my BAKING FAQs where I discuss ingredients, substitutions and common questions with cake making, so that you can be successful in your own baking! I also suggest reading these comprehensive posts on making Perfect American Buttercream, How to Stack, Fill, Crumb Coat and Frost Layer Cakes and How to Use Piping Bags.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the cardamom taste like?

Ground cardamom adds a warm, distinctive flavor that’s delicious in baked goods, especially during the winter months. It’s a very popular spice in Scandinavian countries, particularly when paired with almond. For a less forward flavor, use half the amount of cardamom called for.

Where did you get the candles?

I used these red and gold birthday candles.

Where did you get your Christmas sprinkles?

I’ve bought various sprinkle mixes over the last several Christmases, and then I tend to pick and choose from them the sprinkles I want to use for a specific project. I’ve found some of them at my local King Soopers and World Market, but I’ve also seen similar ones on Amazon. As a general rule, I don’t care for the look of jimmies, and I almost always pick them out of my sprinkle mixes.

So for today’s Christmas sprinkle cake, I used a variety of nonpareils and confetti sprinkles (quins) in red, green and white, which I mixed right into the top layer of buttercream. Then to decorate the cake, I used the cutest mix of gingerbread people, Christmas trees, stockings, holly leaves and candy canes. These ones are very hard and crunchy.

Here are a few sources on Amazon for similar sprinkles:

• Christmas Holly Sprinkles
• Candy Cane Sprinkle Mix
• Christmas Trees Sprinkle Mix
• Christmas Quins
• Gingerbread Christmas Sprinkles
• Red White and Green Nonpareils

How should I store the leftover cake?

Store leftover cake in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days.

Can this cake be frozen?

I have frozen frosted, decorated cakes many times. I recommend freezing cakes in an airtight container for no more than 2-3 weeks in advance. My only concern with the sprinkles would be if the condensation from the freezer might create moisture on the surface, causing the color to run and bleed into the buttercream. So you may want to test this first before freezing a cake with Christmas sprinkles.

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