Chocolate Orange Loaf Cake | Fiesta Friday again!

Happy Friday one and all!

Today I am celebrating the impending weekend (and Fiesta Friday – after a loong absence, sorry Angie, and thanks for having me back!) with a chocolate orange loaf cake.

Now, I wish I could claim ownership of this recipe because it is brilliant, but sadly I cannot. In fact, I can’t even claim to have stumbled across the recipe myself, because it was my housemate Sarah who first found it and made it. On each of the 7 or 8 occasions it has been baked in our house, it has gone down a storm with friends and work colleagues and family, so I can promise it will be popular with yours too!

Most recently I baked this for my new friends on my creative meditation course that I’ve been doing every Wednesday evening for 6 weeks now, and they loved it too. I’ll blog next week about my new found love of meditation, because it deserves a whole post of its own, but I highly recommend you have a read when I do – it just might be what you didn’t know you were looking for.

So, back to the cake at hand. Chocolate and orange. A perfect combination, ever since it was discovered by Terry back in 1760.* Dawn French is rumoured to be a fan. Mr Jaffa has been making his living from it for many years now. And today, I bring it to you, in the form of an easy-to-make, cheap and quick loaf cake.

Chocolate Orange Loaf Cake

• Servings: 10
• Time: 1hr 15mins
• Difficulty: easy
• Print

Credit: Linda at Doe’s Kitchen

Ingredients

• 150g softened butter
• 2 tbsps golden syrup
• 175g light muscovado sugar
• 150g plain flour
• ½tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 25g good quality cocoa powder
• 2 eggs, beaten
• zest of 2 oranges
• juice of 1 orange
• 100g dark chocolate

Method

1. Preheat the oven to gas mark 3/150°C.
2. Grease and line a loaf tin with greaseproof paper.
3. Beat butter, golden syrup and sugar until well mixed – this takes a good few minutes with an electric whisk, perhaps not to be attempted without one!
4. Gradually add eggs, beating until incorporated.
5. Sift in the flour, bicarbonate of soda and cocoa powder, and fold in to the mixture.
6. Add nearly all the orange zest (reserve a few strands for decoration) and the orange juice a little at a time until the mixture is a ‘soft dropping’ consistency (i.e. when you lift the spoon up it plops off easily!).
7. Pour into your loaf tin and bake for 50 minutes. You may need to add another 10 mins or so if your oven is not fan assisted. Check it is cooked when skewer comes out clean.
8. Leave to cool for ten minutes in the tin, then lift it out with the greaseproof paper and leave it to cool on a rack.
9. When the cake is completely cool, melt your chocolate either over a pan of simmering water or very carefully on a low temperature in the microwave in a small jug. Once melted, drizzle it back and forth over the cake until you have covered the top completely. Sprinkle the remaining zest over the cake, and put in the fridge to set.
10. Enjoy!

So, once you have made this, invite all your friends round, because otherwise you will be tempted to eat the entire thing. It is that good. Thank you Linda!

*This claim may involve a little artistic licence.