Chocolate orange cake

I like to think of this cake as an 'everyday cake', a snacking cake, something to be there in the cake tin for when the urge for a little something sweet strikes. There isn't a gooey rich icing or frosting, but that's what I mean by an everyday cake. The cake is good enough not to need any embellishment, it can stand on it's own merit.

This is an adaptation of a recipe in Linda Collister's Easy Baking. I've already made a version of this cake here and so I knew that it was delicious anyway, but this time, my adaptations of the recipe were slightly different. I wanted to use up some yogurt rather than creme fraiche, and I fancied orange as the flavour - chocolate and orange are a match made in heaven (along with chocolate and mint). I also used some 90% cocoa solids chocolate that I had hanging around - it seemed too bitter to eat on its own (although I haven't tried this yet) and so a cake seemed like the perfect opportunity to allow its cocoa flavour to shine through.

Ah, the ubiquitous brown square - or, how many angles can you take a photo of brown squares from?!?

Moist chocolate orange cake
Ingredients
60g dark chocolate, melted (I used 90% cocoa solids)
120g soft butter
170g light muscovado sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 large egg
220g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
20g cocoa powder
120g yogurt (I used full fat Yeo Valley)

Zest and juice of one large orange

Method

- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease and line an 8"/20cm deep square cake tin.

- Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

- Add the melted, cooled, chocolate and mix to combine.

- Add the egg, flour, vanilla, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, cocoa powder and yogurt and mix well, until all is combined and no traces of flour remain.

- The mixture seemed very stiff at this point so I added the juice of the zested orange and mixed well to make the mixture slacker.

- Spoon into the tin and level.

- Bake for 40-50 minutes until just firm. (The original recipe specified 25-30 minutes, but at this point my cake was still extremely wobbly and nowhere near done.)

- Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the tin before turning out.

- Cut into 16 squares.



Just as delicious as I remembered from last time, but more delicate and crumbly than I remembered. It was an extremely moist cake, and very delicate indeed - it fell apart as I picked it up to eat! The flavour was lovely though - really orange-y. I'm not sure about the texture of the zest in there though, I used a microplane grater (coarse) to grate the zest and next time I think I'll use something finer. But that was my only minor niggle, and colleagues thought it was lovely!