Am blaming Ray..

..for my recent indulgence over chocolate-orange cakes!

Lol. As I’ve mentioned in my comment, we don’t have Jaffa Cakes here, though according to my brother I may get lucky at the imported items section. But I was too lazy to go out, and the idea of baking a chocolate-orange cake seems wonderful to me. Am not a big fan of plain orange juice, but mix it with chocolate, or turn it to some tasty concoctions, mmmm delicious!

Chocolate-orange cake.

I baked twice as my first attempt was pretty much a failure (but still the cake is almost finished by now). The first recipe which I found on the net was rated 5 stars by all readers. Hmm.. didn’t turn out well for me. The cake was pretty hard, crusty on top and the texture is dry. Prolly I did something wrong somewhere. My second attempt was much better. I modified my chocolate cake recipe and added some orange puree, and my family loves it 🙂

This recipe yields 2 cakes – am using a 8 – 9 inch round springform pan. Halve the recipe if you wish to bake a normal size cake. This one is rather huge, and use lotsa eggs. Oh well, you do the maths.

Ingredients:

• 450gm butter
• 600gm caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 9 eggs
• 400gm all purpose flour
• 2 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
• 150gm cocoa powder
• 2 oranges – I used an orange but I think it’ll taste better with 2
• Water

Steps:

• Wash the orange cleanly and boil the whole orange for about 30 minutes. Cool it off before you whizz it with a food processor.
• In a separate bowl, beat the sugar and butter until it’s fluffy and smooth.
• Add in the egg one by one into the batter while continuously beating it until it mixed well.
• Sift the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt. Slowly add them to the batter bit by bit. Mix well. Try not to overbeat it in order to keep the batter ‘airy’.
• In another separate bowl, add in some water to the pureed orange until it levels up to 400ml, meniscus level. Sheesh. I don’t remember when was the last time I used the word ‘meniscus’.
• Sift the cocoa powder to the orange mixture, stir them well and fold them in to the batter. Mix well.
• Bake it for about 90 minutes at a 175C pre-heated oven. Use a cake tester, insert it into the cake and if it comes out clean, it’s done. The sides tend to shrink as well when it is well baked.

I made some orange candy using this recipe. I glazed the top of both cakes with the remaining orange syrup to give a stronger orange flavour to the cakes. Stacked both cakes on top of each other and layered it with a chocolate mousse and finally, smothered the cake with a creamy chocolate ganache.

My cake impersonates itself as pacman.

My food mixer isn’t working anymore so I had to do all the beating and mixing manually, occasionally switching turns with mom. It was pretty tiring and since the butter was just taken out of the fridge, I had a hard time in beating it till smooth. Think I’ve developed bicep muscles.

I find myself humming the ‘cake’ song while baking this cake. Am blaming someone else for that 😛

Anyway, this cake is great
It’s so delicious and moist
Look at me still talking
When there’s Science to do
lalalalalalala..