A Year of Seasonal Recipes: Blood Oranges!

updated: March 25, 2026

Hello!! It is WEEK ONE of “A Year of Seasonal Recipes!” The much delayed but much anticipated 365-day exploration of French seasonal recipes (as the title suggests!) We start with l’orange sanguine: THE BLOOD ORANGE. And we are making a delectable — and highly photographable — blood orange upside-down cake.

Week 1 was not supposed to focus on blood oranges! It was supposed to be typical late winter/early springtime staples at the food markets: beets, or onions. (I come from a long line of people who love beets.) But then I was nervous about both beets (are there people, outside of my family, who like beets?? I cannot prove this?) and onions (mostly because I either wanted to do an onion tart or onion soup, and both seemed out of my ability zone) — so I asked newsletter readers to vote on which we should do. The default voting module on my newsletter requires three options, so I added blood oranges. Which won! Obviously! Who wouldn’t vote for blood oranges in that situation (apparently 46% of the many people who voted!)! After weeks combing through French cookbooks, looking for the perfect beet or onion recipe, we would go with the blood orange!

marie claire blood oranges recipe — The Marie Claire Version

In the future, I’ll be able to post the recipes here, because I’ll be sharing them from cookbooks — but because of the blood orange emergency, I had to pull from online recipes — in this case, un gâteau renversé à l’orange sanguine, courtesy of Marie Claire.

And of course: to sign up for future editions, see here.

Verdict

This cake was delicious (250g of sugar lol) and easier to prepare than I’d expected. (As regular readers know, I am a professional-level enthusiast of seasonal fruit and vegetables but an amateur chef.) It was also extremely pretty. In fact, it was prettier than it was delicious, but it was exceptionally pretty. Sometimes you just want people to take pictures of your cake.

Shopping List:

9-inch springform pan
Vanilla bean pod
Vanilla bean paste (alternative to bean)
Food scale

Plus what I had on hand — flour, powdered sugar, regular sugar, eggs, and baking powder — and our special ingredient: blood oranges (notes below).

Some notes:

1. Finding blood oranges

The nearest Whole Foods from my current location is a tidy 102 miles. Ultimately, I had to drive to the largest health food shop in the region (26 miles away) to find blood oranges, but once there, I found a good assortment, and purchased both Moros (which are smaller, with more dramatic, nearly purple interiors) and Taroccos, which were much larger, had a pebbled rind, and only had small areas of red flesh — they were almost indistinguishable from a regular orange. If I had to do it all over again, I would only buy Moros, because they looked better and because I would have been able to fit more of them on the top of the cake, since they were smaller — the Taroccos sort of crowded them out. Moros are supposed to have a distinctly berry-ish taste, but I couldn’t pick it out. I found this report on blood oranges very useful.

2. The pan

I had planned to use a 10-inch springform pan (sold at Monoprix as a moule à manqué démontable or a moule à charnière) but the recipe just called for a moule à manqué — a regular baking pan. However, my 8-inch baking pan was absolutely not up to the task, and I ended up removing about a third of the dough before putting it in the oven, worried that the cake would overflow — I kept spooning out excess dough until it came to about halfway up the side. Ultimately, the better choice would have been my 10-inch springform pan.

3. The 50g of sucre en poudre

It just felt like a lot!! I measured it out but ended up disposing off what didn’t stick to the buttered pan. This was a mistake, and if I did it over again I would follow the directions here. The oranges ultimately could have used the additional sweetness.

4. 250g of butter

That is just a tremendous amount of butter. That is more than an entire block of Kerrygold butter (which is 227g). That means there’s a one-to-one ratio between the butter and the flour, putting this in the “rich” cake category.

5. The levure chimique

Baking powder is apportioned by the sachet in this recipe, which calls for a half-sachet. Through my research (read: looking at levure chimique at the Galeries Lafayette website), I discovered that a single sachet corresponds to 500g of flour — so this 250g-of-flour cake should get a half-sachet (as the recipe called for). A sachet is generally 10g, making a half-sachet 5g. This also felt like too much — maybe because I was adding it by weight instead of compressing it into a tablespoon, and I was worried that my cake would expand beyond control. (This did not happen.)

6. The gousse de vanille

The only expensive ingredient here — in fact, the only one that I had to shop for, except the oranges (which were super cheap — $2.89 altogether). (I did need to replace my butter!!) I struggled over this — a single vanilla pod at my local shop is $19(!). Ultimately, I wanted to give the cake its best chance at success and bought it. I’m glad I did: It smelled amazing, and the fine black vanilla dots in the dough were extremely appealing. I’ve only made this cake once, and with the vanilla pod, so I can’t say how it might have fared with a cheaper replacement — vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste.