Thursday 4 November 2010

An Old Favourite - Chocolate and Orange Loaf

My Chief Taster has had a rough few days; 36 hours starvation, an inner cleansing and an uncomfortable examination. Fortunately the results showed a marked improvement with his medical condition, but such an ordeal calls for comfort food and a favourite cake, not some of my experimental cooking!


I rolled out this chocolate and orange marble cake recipe, but instead of baking it in a round tin, I baked it in a long loaf tin, with a 2lb capacity. Rather than putting blobs of cake batter into the tin and swirling them together to give a marbled effect, I used the batter in alternate layers. I had hoped the layers would make more of a swirly effect as they baked, but overall, I'm quite pleased with the results, which looks good in slices from the loaf shape.

This is a lovely rich tasting cake, with a high proportion of fat and eggs to flour, kept moist by ground almonds in the batter and melted chocolate as well as cocoa in the dark portion of the batter.

13 comments:

Beauty's Bad Habit said...

It looks/ sounds gorgeous! Have you a suggestion for anything I could replace the ground almonds with? My boyfriend is allergic to nuts :/

Debs @ DKC said...

OMG chocolate & orange. I love that combination, always reminds me of Terry's LOL.

Can I be your chief taster too please in future.

Suelle said...

The simplest solution would be to replace the almonds with 75g more flour.

However this would lose some of the moistness you get from ground nuts. My favourite baker, Dan Lepard, recommends tapioca flour to add moistness to cakes.

I wouldn't use 80g though - I would increase the flour to 200g, add 55g of tapioca flour and increase the milk to 100mls, as tapioca absorbs more liquid than other flours. I ground tapioca pearls in a coffee grinder to get tapioca flour.

You might find it a bit of a trial and error to get the balance of tapioca and extra liquid right, and I'm not sure how it would affect the cooking time either. I suggest testing at 5 minute intervals after 60 minutes baking.

Suelle said...

Debs - I haven't yet found a good way of sending cakes through the post! LOL!

celia said...

I love this recipe - I made it last year! Thanks for the reminder, Suelle, haven't made it since, so must put it on the to-bake list..

Caroline said...

Thank you for the inspiration! I was wondering what to make with 4 eggs going out of date today and you've helped me decide - a chocolate and vanilla marbled cake in a bundt tin is baking as I type.

No doubt it'll be months before it makes it onto my blog, I'm so behind with posting :-S

Your loaf cake looks great, I really like the layered look of it. Hope the CT recovers from his procedure soon, and glad the news is positive!

Unknown said...

oh oh oh i've been looking for an old-fashioned marble cake recipe for an age now, so thank-you for this one... and chocolate orange too! Double perfect!

Suelle said...

You're welcome, Dom - hope you enjoy it!

Chele said...

I think it looks totally profesh! Fantastic! Hope the Cheif taste tester is feeling better for his comforat food - he certainly earnt it by the sounds of things!

Gillian said...

Great stuff. Marbling is excellent ... it looks to me like the slices are smiling. That same technique is used by Alice Medrich (Bittersweet).

Suelle said...

Thanks, Chele and Gillian.

I really like the layered swirling which has many more layers than the 5 I've done, but I've never made a cake big enough to divide into so many portions. :)

Anne said...

Hope your chief taster is on the mend now!

The cake looks so pretty too, I love the chocolate orange combination!

Danielle said...

The cake looks really pretty! I like the design(: I never really thought of using orange and chocolate together- I'm sure it tastes good though!