Orange Poke Cake Recipe (5 Minutes Prep)

My favorite cake has no layers and no frosting. It contains no swirls, no molten chocolate middle, and no jammy filling. There’s no fruit on the bottom, or on the top, and no dollops of whipped cream. There are no fancy decorations. In fact, nothing about this cake is fancy.

It’s a boxed cake mixed with boxed pudding and glazed with the simplest of glazes. It’s so basic that I get a little sheepish serving it to people outside my own family—people who might think it looks unfinished or just like a run-of-the-mill boxed sheet cake. But everyone who’s ever tried this cake knows: it’s an irresistible wonder.

My family calls it orange cake, and the recipe dates back to long before I was born. Scribbled on a notecard in my mother’s recipe box and carefully transcribed by myself and each of my siblings for safekeeping, the recipe comes from my mother’s childhood neighbor, a wonderful woman named Doris who was like a second mother to my mom.

Growing up, my family had many of Doris’s classics in our regular rotation, from pumpkin muffins to zucchini bread. Orange cake might be my favorite of Doris’s recipes. 

What Makes This Cake Special

What amazes me every time is how incredible this cake tastes for the minimal amount of work. It’s a poke cake, which is a sheet cake that gets poked with a fork when it comes out of the oven and then covered in glaze or syrup that seeps into the holes. This basic technique yields incredibly moist results.

In my orange cake, I combine powdered sugar with orange juice and a little bit of melted butter for a zesty, sugary soak that makes for an astoundedly juicy cake. The corners, where the glaze collects and the sugars crystallize, are my favorite pieces.

The Secret Ingredient

But poking isn’t the only trick that makes this recipe shine. I also add instant lemon pudding to the boxed cake mix. I never gave this much thought, thinking that the powdered pudding simply enhanced the citrusy flavor, until I read a New York Times article highlighting nostalgic desserts, like a buzzy pistachio bundt cake at a New York City restaurant named Claud.

“Instant pudding is more than just a century-old convenience food for busy home cooks. It’s how chefs make soft, spongy cakes that remind diners of their favorite childhood desserts,” writer Priya Krishna explains. The pudding mix imparts an especially springy texture to this orange cake as well as a nostalgic flavor.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve baked this cake, but a particularly memorable time was one of my son’s first birthdays. Because it’s free of any major frosting, like buttercream or cream cheese, I thought the cake would be a good one for a kid his age. The look on his face when he saw it coming for him, one candle lit on top, was a look I’ll never forget.

I’ve continued the tradition of making it his birthday cake every year. But because it’s so easy and so delicious, we make it all year long, too.