Cream cheese chocolate orange cake - We Should Cocoa

After last month's apple chocolate challenge, this month Choclette has been kind to us and given us orange to pair with chocolate, a classic combo. Chocolate and orange work so well together that this month the challenge has been to come up with something different. Well, I haven't really done something different, but I have made a really rather good cake, and that should be counted a successful challenge I think!

It came about as I found I had half a tub of cream cheese in the fridge with no immediate plans. Trawling round I found that I had made a cake containing cream cheese relatively recently. It was a good cake and deserved another outing, but in a modified form.

This is based (heavily) on Dan Lepard's Ginger chocolate chip pound cake, modified to suit my requirements.

Cream Cheese Chocolate Orange Cake
Ingredients
100g unsalted butter, melted
200g caster sugar
125g full fat cream cheese
3 medium eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
220g plain flour
30g cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
100g dark chocolate, chopped,
grated zest of one large orange

Chocolate fudge frosting
100g dark chocolate, chopped
50g unsalted butter
1 rounded tbsp golden syrup

Sprinkles to decorate

Method

- Preheat the oven to Gas4/180C. Grease and line an 8"/20cm square cake tin.

- Mix together the butter and caster sugar. While the butter is still warm, beat in the cream cheese. This was really satisfying, and gave a beautifully creamy, glossy mixture.

- Beat in the eggs one at a time until combined then add the vanilla and orange zest.

- Sift in the flour and cocoa powder and beat until combined.

- Stir in the chocolate chips.

- Spoon into the tin and bake for 40-45 minutes until a skewer/cake tester comes out clean or with only a few crumbs remaining.

- Leave to cool on a wire rack and in the meantime, make the frosting.

- Melt the butter, chocolate and golden syrup over a pan of hot water.

- Allow to cool until spreading consistency, this will take a couple of hours.

- Spread the frosting over the cake and sprinkle with decorations as desired.

My cake took 45 minutes to bake, and then I partially covered it with foil and gave it another 5 mins or so to finish cooking the centre.

This was a lovely cake and the orange flavour came through really well without being overpowering or artificial, which is something I sometimes find with orange flavoured chocolate items.

It was a little dry though, and would probably have been better eaten with either a big blob of vanilla ice cream, or some pouring cream as a dessert, or perhaps even better than both of those, with some orange flavoured custard - hot enough to make the topping go all gooey. Mmmm, yum! However, there were no complaints, and it disappeared rapidly enough when taken in to work!