Chocolate Orange Loaf Cake

Another loaf cake! This time it’s a bit of a fancy one! I started out making this as a regular weekday cake, then realised it was turning into a Special Cake. I popped some candles in it and transformed it into a birthday cake – luckily the recipient’s birthday was just five days away! It’s super easy to make, it’s just quite heavy on the ol’ ingredients! But it’s delicious – dense, chocolatey and with an unmistakable Terry’s tang.

Chocolate Orange Loaf Cake

Ingredients

250g butter or baking spread
250g light brown sugar
200g self raising flour
50g cocoa powder
5 eggs
Zest of 2 oranges
1/2 tsp orange extract
1 dark Terry’s Chocolate Orange

Icing

125g unsalted butter – room temperature
250g icing sugar
125g dark or milk Terry’s Chocolate Orange
1 tbsp milk
Terry’s Chocolate Orange segments to decorate

Method

  1. Preheat your oven to 180°C/160°C fan/gas mark 4 and line a 2lb loaf tin. Mine is slightly smaller, so I needed more cooking time – see notes below.
  2. Beat together your baking spread or butter and sugar for a few minutes with a hand or stand mixer until well combined and fluffy.
  3. Add the flour, cocoa, eggs, orange zest and orange extract and carefully combine until well mixed. Watch out for those flour clouds puffing up around the kitchen!
  4. Chop up your dark chocolate orange into chunks and stir them into your mixture.
  5. Pour the mix tint your loaf tin.
  6. Pop into the oven for around an hour. Check after 55 minutes. If it’s still wobbly, return to the oven and check again after 10 minutes. With a slightly smaller loaf tin, the baking time will need to be extended, don’t worry if it takes longer, but keep checking by inserting a skewer to the centre. When it comes out clean, or with just a few crumbs, your cake is done! Remember there’s melted chocolate in there, so if the skewer comes out chocolatey, it’s worth checking again!
  7. Cool in the tin before removing to a cooling rack.
  8. Ice when it’s completely cool.

Icing

  1. Cut your your room-temperature butter into cubes and beat in stand mixer, or with a hand mixer, for a couple of minutes until it is pale. You may need to scrape down the sides of the bowl, mid way through to ensure it’s all beaten nicely.
  2. Melt your chocolate orange, either in the microwave in 30 second blasts, or in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water. I used a mixture of dark and milk chocolate orange which was absolutely delicious – the dark chocolate takes the edge off the sweetness of the milk.
  3. Add the icing sugar to the butter – carefully! And beat until smooth.
  4. Add the melted chocolate to the butter and sugar and beat to combine.
  5. If the mix is too stiff, add a little milk to loosen – it needs to be a pipe-able consistency.
  6. Pop the icing in a piping bag and pipe decorative swirls, rosettes, rows or stars onto the cooled cake – whatever pattern you fancy! Or you can spread it on with a palette knife.
  7. Decorate the top with your remaining chocolate orange slices. They’re great for marking how wide a slice should be ?.

Enjoy!

?❤️?

From Jane’s Patisserie.

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