Chocolate Chip and Orange Cake

Reading my list of posts for January, it looks as if it's ages since I made chocolate cake for CT. In fact, the recipes I've posted have been interspersed with batches of brownies made with mayonnaise, about which I've already posted.

However, it's about time a chocolate cake crept back into the cake tin; this time I returned to the basic oil/yogurt recipe which I've used several times before. It started as this Ina Garten recipe, although it's had so many tweaks that it doesn't look much like it now. The main tweak has been to reduce the liquid by leaving out the volume provided by lemon juice in the original. I like this recipe because it's quick to mix and get into the oven. All I do is mix the basic dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet in another, and whisk the liquid into the flour until no patches of flour show. Then any lumpy ingredients such as chocolate, in this case, or fruit and nuts, are folded in. The slowest part of making this cake was chopping the chocolate!

The ingredients were: 200g plain flour, 2 tsp baking powder, 200g caster sugar, the zest of a medium orange, 250mls yogurt, 3 large eggs, 115g oil (I used sunflower), 1 teaspoon orange extract, 150g chopped plain chocolate (I used 70%).

The batter is put into a prepared 20cm round tin and baked at 180C for around 60 minutes, until a test probe comes out clean. Cool in tin for 15 minutes before removing to a wire rack to finish cooling.

It's hard to tell on the basis of cutting just a couple of slices, but it looks as if the larger pieces of chocolate sank as the cake baked, although I don't think this is a major issue - there are plenty of smaller pieces in the upper half of the cake.