Randomly, I decided to bake at the weekend with Missy Woo and this cake jumped out at me from a booklet with this month's Good Food magazine as I had everything I needed to hand, and it celebrated two things she loves foodwise - chocolate and citrus. This is the little girl that will literally lick the cut edge of lemons and enjoy it.
The original recipe is for a loaf cake but I thought I would share my unique method of preparation with you. As I didn't have a large enough loaf tin (it specified a 1.2 litre loaf tin), I used a 7 or 8 inch round deep baking tin which really requires adjustments of cooking time, which I have given here. Also, I wasn't sure the cake would be orangey enough so I took inspiration from Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries, which has an orange drizzle loaf cake recipe using marmalade, so I bunged that in too.
Jaffa Drizzle Cake
Ingredients
(Cuts into 10-12)
For the cake:
140g/5oz butter, softened
200g/7oz self-raising flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
200g/7oz caster sugar
3 large eggs
6 tbsp milk
75g any marmalade - shredless is best
1 large orange
For the syrup:
3 tbsp orange juice (from the orange)
50g/2oz caster sugar
To top the cake:
75g/3oz dark chocolate (the darker, the better - 70% cocoa solids is good)
This is how I actually did it.
1. Heat your oven to 180C/160C fan/Gas 4. Butter and line the base of either a 20cm/8" deep round tin or a 1.2l loaf tin with baking parchment.
2. Measure your butter, and place in microwave ready to soften.
3. Place all the cake ingredients into a mixing bowl and start to beat with hand whisk. Realise you haven't grated in the zest of the orange, so stop and finely grate the zest into the bowl.
4. Recommence beating with hand whisk for 3-5 mins and wonder why it's not gone light and fluffy as expected, but more like a cake batter. Realise baking powder has not been added, add that in and mix again.
5. Realise your cake mixture is not going to go light and fluffy. Shrug. Pour cake batter into tin and go to place cake in oven. Turn towards microwave and ..... OH MY GOD! The butter. It's STILL in the microwave. Turn microwave on to soften butter.
6. Wrestle cake bowl that children were about to start licking from small hands, pour cake batter into bowl. Quickly wash out tin, discarding cake parchment. Re-butter and re-line the base of the tin.
7. Add now softened butter. Mix again, and realise that butter was indeed the missing ingredient and the mixture finally becomes light and fluffy. Place in the tin, level the top.
8. Bake in the oven until risen and firm to the touch, should be about 50-55 mins if you use a round tin, 40-50 mins if you are using the loaf tin. In the last few mins of cooking, place the orange juice and sugar in a pan over a gentle heat, and stir until all the sugar dissolved. Try to keep warm, but don't allow to bubble too much or the liquid will evaporate and dry too hard. (Ahem.)
9. Remove cake from the oven and spoon over the syrup. Leave to cool in the tin. Remove from the tin, using ingenuity and some force to ease the solidified syrup from the top of the cake. Leave to cool completely.
10. Break the chocolate into small pieces and either melt in a bowl over a pan of simmering water, ensuring the water does not touch the bowl or microwave in 30 second bursts and stirring vigorously between. Drizzle over the cake and leave to set.
Thankfully, this is a fairly forgiving cake. It's an all-in-one sponge, so all you do is place ingredients in the bowl and just mix them together. Missing the butter out initially didn't mean the final cake suffered - it was actually light and fluffy, even though it sank back quite some distance after removing from the oven, although the syrup might be the culprit there. It smells gorgeous, even cold. I wondered if you could add some cocoa powder to the sponge to make it fully chocolate and orange flavoured; that might be a step too far but it may be an experiment for another day.
Linking this up with Helen's Cake of the Week feature once again, just because I love her cakes!
