Chocolate Orange Cake – Recipe

A chocolate sponge cake with chocolate orange buttercream. Sounds fancy, but it's really just once magic ingredient that turns this otherwise regular (and delicious) chocolatey cake into a chocolate orange cake: orange extract. A teaspoon of this stuff in the chocolate buttercream makes it taste just like a certain branded orange-shaped chocolate.

Ingredients for Cake:

-6oz (170g) softened unsalted butter
-6oz (170g) caster sugar
-4oz (110g) self raising flour
-2oz (60g) cocoa powder
-3 eggs
-5tbsp milk
-A pinch of salt

Ingredients for Buttercream:

-175g softened unsalted butter
-650g icing sugar
-125g cocoa powder
-150ml milk
-1tsp orange oil

Method:

1) Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C and grease/ line two 8" round baking pans.

2) Cream the sugar and butter together until fluffy and light, and then beat in the eggs until smooth.

3) Sift in half of the dry ingredients together and whisk in. Beat in the wet ingredients, and then incorporate the rest of the dry stuff.

4) Evenly distribute between the two pans, level out with the back of a spoon or spatula, tap each pan on the counter to get rid of air bubbles and bake in the oven for about 25mins (or until a skewer poked in the middle comes out clean, or if you poke the sponge with your finger it bounces back).

5) Cool on wire racks until completely cold.

6) To make the buttercream, beat the butter by itself in a large bowl until pale and fluffy. As you did with the sponge, alternate between dry and wet ingredients, first sifting in and then whisking up half of the dry stuff with the butter, whisking in the wet stuff and then adding in the rest of the dry.

7) Sandwich your cooled cake rounds with a bit of the buttercream, and spread the rest over. Eat with gusto!

Decoration Tips

I made up a tiny amount of plain orange buttercream (made the same way as above only without the cocoa powder), and coloured it green and orange to decorate the cake. As you can see, I also de-constructed an actual Terry's chocolate orange to add the finishing touches, too.