Lemon Orange Layer Cake

Every spring, I crave all of the fruit flavored cakes, and this DELICIOUS scratch Lemon Orange Cake is a new favorite! If you like citrus, you're about to fall in love.

Homemade orange curd and orange cream cheese frosting are sandwiched between layers of lemon cake, and frosted with orange cream cheese frosting in this heavenly dessert!

A Delicious Balance of Lemon and Orange  

We just love the endless options for delicious flavor pairings when it comes to lemon cake. We've made Lemon Coconut Cake, Lemon Almond Cake, Strawberry Lemonade Cake, and so many more!

Today's Lemon Orange Cake is a fusion of two of our most popular cake recipes on our site-- our scratch Lemon Cake recipe, and our Orange Dreamsicle Cake.

We're using our favorite scratch lemon layer cake recipe along with the Orange Cream Cheese frosting from our Dreamsicle Cake.

The Orange Curd filling is a new recipe for us, and is bursting with lemon and orange flavor thanks to the orange and lemon zest as well as freshly squeezed orange juice!

Altogether, this is the PERFECT cake recipe for spring and summer entertaining (and a year-round favorite for anyone that loves citrus desserts)!

How to Make a Lemon Orange Cake

You can find the full, printable recipe card at the bottom of this post. Here is a quick look at the steps for our lemon cake!

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees
• Grease and flour three 8 inch pans.
• Dry Ingredients: In a medium sized bowl, add the cake flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and zest of 2 lemons. Whisk to blend and set aside.

• In another bowl, add the milk, vegetable oil and lemon juice, and lemon extract. Whisk to blend and set aside.
• In the bowl of your mixer, mix the softened butter until smooth. Gradually add the sugar and mix on medium speed 3 to 5 minutes until it is lightened in color and fluffy.

• Next, add the eggs one at a time, mixing until the yellow of the yolk disappears.
• Add the flour mixture and the milk mixture alternately. Begin and end with the flour (3 additions of flour and 2 of milk). Mix until combined and smooth, do not mix above medium speed or over mix.

• Pour the batter into the prepared pans, smoothing the tops with the back of a spoon. Bake at 350 degrees. If baking three 8 inch pans, bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes.

Filling and Frosting

Now that we have the lemon side of the Lemon Orange Cake taken care of, it is time to bring in some delicious orange flavor!

For the filling, we have a heavenly Orange Cream Cheese Frosting along with a flavorful orange curd. This creates the perfect balance of citrus flavor for our cake.

If you've followed our site for any amount of time, you know that we love cream cheese frosting recipes! This frosting is so creamy and delicious, and perfect with our lemon cake layers.

Our orange curd (just as with our lemon curd and lime curd), is prepared in a saucepan and as it cools, it thickens to a perfectly spreadable consistency.

Orange curd adds a wonderful boost of citrus flavor to this cake. (You may enjoy our video on how to make orange curd.)

We added a bit of lemon zest and juice to the orange curd to brighten the flavor even more.

Assembling the Lemon Orange Cake

Once the lemon cake layers have cooled, it is time to assemble. Place the first cake layer on the pedestal or cake board and pipe a dam of orange cream cheese frosting about ¼ inch from the edge of the cake.

You can either snip the tip away from a disposable piping bag to apply the dam, or use a medium sized round piping tip (10 or 12 tip).

Next, spread a layer of orange curd within the dam. The purpose of the dam is to prevent the filling from escaping when the layers are stacked. Our orange curd is fairly thick but it's easy enough to add a dam just in case.

Because we love this orange cream cheese frosting recipe so much, we spread a little on top of the curd as well. Just the curd alone as a filling would be delicious!

Once the layers are stacked, fill in any gaps between your cake layers with the orange cream cheese frosting and apply your crumb coat. (A crumb coat is a very thin layer of frosting applied to the top of the cake and around the sides.)

Chill as Needed: After the crumb coat, we like to chill the cake in the freezer for about 15 minutes (or longer in the rerigerator) to firm everything up before decorating the cake.

Decorating the Cake

Decorate your cake however you like! You could go with a smooth finish, a textured finished (as with our ridged buttercream cake), or something in between! (See How to Frost a Cake for more easy ideas!)

Add the final coat of frosting to the chilled cake. I like to frost my cakes as I rotate them on a turntable, then I smooth and level things out with a bench scraper.

For an extra smooth finish, freeze your frosted cake tier for about 15 minutes, and then smooth over it with a hot bench scraper or spatula that has been heated in very hot water. We have a video on this easy technique which is known as the Hot Knife Method of smoothing.

Easy Textured Buttercream Border

After smoothing the orange cream cheese frosting around the sides of the cake, I used my small rounded offset spatula to add texture on top as well as around the base of the cake.

I tinted some of the remaining frosting a darker shade of orange and applied both light and darker shades of the frosting around the base of the cake bit by bit for added texture and color.

This is a great alternative to a piped border and I love the look!

 All finished! We piped accents around the top of the cake with our Wilton 6B tip, and threw on a few white sprinkles here and there (nonpareils) just for fun. 

Here's our cake after slicing, in all of it's orange and lemony goodness! Doesn't this cake just look like summertime? 

Recipe FAQs

More Citrus Cakes

We have more fresh & fruity cake recipes that we'd love to share with you.

Put these on your must-make list! Some of our most popular are our fluffy Orange Cake, our Limoncello Cake if you're feeling fancy, a Lemonade Cake with an added bit of tartness, and a wonderful Lemon Blueberry Cake.

We also have a great Orange Cranberry Cake that is perfect for the holidays!

Thanks so much for stopping by! We hope that you enjoy this moist Lemon Orange Layer Cake.

Don't miss our full collection of the best cake and frosting recipes in our Cake Recipes Section! Whether you are searching for birthday cake recipes, bridal shower cakes, baby shower cakes, and more, we have something for you.

If you're looking for spring and summer fruity desserts in particular, make sure to check out our roundup of favorite Cake Recipes for Spring and Summer

Lemon Orange Layer Cake

BY Melissa and Bebe

This Lemon Orange Cake recipe is so moist and bursting with citrus flavor!

Course: Dessert

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Ingredients

For the Lemon Cake

• ▢ 1 ½ sticks (170g) unsalted butter, softened
• ▢ 1 ½ cups sugar (300g)
• ▢ 4 large eggs, room temperature (if cold, place in a bowl of warm water for 5 min.)
• ▢ 3 cups cake flour (342g)*if you do not have cake flour, see Notes
• ▢ ½ teaspoon salt (3g)
• ▢ 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder (7g)
• ▢ ½ teaspoon baking soda (3g)
• ▢ 1 cup milk (242g)
• ▢ ¼ cup lemon juice (57g)
• ▢ ¼ cup vegetable oil (53g)
• ▢ zest of 2 lemons
• ▢ 1 Tablespoon lemon extract (10g)

For the Orange Curd Filling

• ▢ Zest of 3 oranges and 1 lemon
• ▢ 2 egg yolks
• ▢ ¾ cup sugar (150g)
• ▢ ¼ cup cornstarch (30g)
• ▢ ¾ cup fresh orange juice (this is the juice from about 3 oranges) (180g)
• ▢ 3-4 Tablespoons Lemon Juice (this is the juice from one lemon) (48g)
• ▢ 2 Tablespoons butter (28g)

For the Orange Cream Cheese Frosting

• ▢ We increased our usual orange cream cheese recipe amount by 1.5 since we're using as a filling in addition to frosting.
• ▢ 3 sticks unsalted butter, softened (339g)It should still feel cool and hold its shape, yet dent when pressed.
• ▢ 21 oz cream cheese, slightly softened. (total weight 678g) We used three 8 oz packages cream cheese.
• ▢ 1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract (6g)
• ▢ 1 ½ teaspoons orange extract (6g)
• ▢ ¾ teaspoon salt (3g)
• ▢ 9 cups (1,035g) confectioners' sugar (You can adjust amount to your liking.)
• ▢ Orange Coloring Gel optional We used a very small amount for tinting.

Instructions

For the Lemon Cake

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees
• Grease and flour three 8 inch pans.
• In a medium sized bowl add the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and zest of 2 lemons. Whisk to blend and set aside.
• In another bowl, add the milk, vegetable oil and lemon juice, and lemon extract. Whisk to blend and set aside.
• In the bowl of your mixer, beat the softened butter until smooth. Gradually add the sugar and mix on medium speed 3 to 5 minutes until it is lightened in color and fluffy.
• Add the eggs one at a time, mixing until the yellow of the yolk disappears.
• Add the flour mixture and the milk mixture alternately. Begin and end with the flour (3 additions of flour and 2 of milk). Mix until combined and smooth, do not mix above medium speed or over mix.
• Pour the batter into the prepared pans, smoothing the tops with the back of a spoon. Bake at 350 degrees. If baking three 8 inch pans, bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes. For two 8 inch pans, bake at 350 for 30 to 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean or with only a few crumbs attached. Let the cakes cool in the pans 10 minutes then turn out.

For the Orange Curd Filling

• Wash and dry the oranges and lemon — then zest all of them. It is best to use a microplane, being careful to get just the outside not the white beneath.
• In a sauce pan add the sugar cornstarch, egg yolks, orange and lemon juice and zest and butter. Stir to blend.
• Cook on medium low heat, stirring until ingredients are smooth and well combined. Increase to medium heat and stir constantly until the mixture begins to thicken and bubble. Reduce heat and stir for about a minute more- it will take on a pudding-like thickness/consistency.
• Remove the sauce pan from the heat.
• Pour curd into a heat proof bowl. Allow to cool 15 minutes, press a piece of plastic wrap onto the top of the curd to prevent a "skin" from forming. Refrigerate until cool,  the curd will thicken further as it cools. The curd can be refrigerated for a week. When ready to use, remove from the refrigerator and allow to warm a bit and stir for easier spreading. It can also be frozen for 3 months.

For the Orange Cream Cheese Frosting

• Cut the butter into slices and add to the bowl of your mixer. Beat on low to medium speed until the butter is softened and smooth.
• Cut the slightly softened cream cheese into pieces and add to the butter, beating at low to medium speed until incorporated.
• Add the vanilla and orange flavorings. Gradually add the powdered sugar beating on low speed until blended. Cover the bowl with a towel to keep down the cloud of powdered sugar.
• Increase mixing speed and beat until fluffy. Don't over beat.
• This frosting will pipe best if used while still chilled. You can make it in advance, refrigerate and when ready to use let it soften slightly (do not microwave) and remix.

Notes

To assemble the cake, I piped a dam of orange cream cheese frosting about ¼ inch from the edge of the cake layer, then filled with a layer of curd, topped with a layer of cream cheese frosting. Repeat, then frost as usual.

If your orange cream cheese frosting is too soft, you can add more powdered sugar, and you can also chill it as needed to firm it up for frosting the cake or piping.

Cake Flour Substitution: For each cup of all purpose flour (or plain flour in the UK) remove 2 Tablespoons of flour and replace with 2 Tablespoons of cornstarch. For this recipe, measure out 3 cups all purpose flour, remove 6 Tablespoons and replace with 6 Tablespoons cornstarch. Whisk to blend.

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