Chocolate Orange Drizzle Loaf Cake

Hurrah, this is my first ever creation made especially for the Sweet and Simple monthly baking event and let me just say straight from the start, this cake is every bit as moist and delicious as it sounds - it had such a great texture too! Click on any of my pictures for a larger, clearer version and you'll see what I mean.
I did make a few wonk-style tweaks to this but nothing major. The recipe including my changes appears below but I recommend that if you want to make this cake in it's original form or want more detailed information on preparing it then do check out the 'real deal' here.

This recipe is for a 2lb loaf however as there's just the 2 of us at home we'd struggle to get through that by ourselves. I could of made mini-loaves but I wanted to try and keep things as close in spirit as possible therefore despite already owning both a mini-loaf and a 2lb pan I bought a 1lb one especially so I could make 2 - one for home, one for work. By the way, this size loaf is so cute and dinky - they're great!

Much as I love to bake them I also love to eat them. Unfortunately I'm way too 'cuddly' as it is so if I'm to have fun and enjoy my own creations it does mean that on occasion compromises need to be made. Today I did this by going half and half with sugar and sweetener for the cake portion. So ironically, considering I spend most of my time converting cups to metric, I converted the 175g sugar into cups as sweetener is feather light in comparison to normal sugar and measuring by weight wouldn't work. Yay for my Culiverter widget (Pssst! It's over there, just on the left...yeah, there...see it?) which made it child's play for me to make the conversion.

Obviously I've not tasted the original to compare it with but it tasted perfectly 'normal' to me so I would have absolutely no problem making this with part sweetener again in future.

For the syrup I reduced the sugar to 75g as 100g seemed quite a lot in comparison to how much juice I had. Talking of the syrup just look at how this cake positively glistens once it's been poured over the top. When I saw that I almost didn't add the topping because I thought it looked gorgeous as it was!

Last but not least I switched to white chocolate for the topping. To be honest I'd forgotten what a nightmare white chocolate is to work with and for a moment my luscious cake looked like it had turned into a disaster. It kind of separates and turns globby when melted (though if you add more Mascarpone it would turn into a normal frosting). When trying to spread it on the cake I had a fleeting image of cheese on toast - not good!

In the end I gave up trying to spread with a spoon and just worked it over with my fingertips. I wasn't overly impressed with the look though and it even seemed to be a little oily...and therein lay my salvation. Bearing in mind the chocolate was still warm I'm sure the oil would have been reabsorbed back in to it when it cooled again but I wasn't going to take the chance so I grabbed a piece of kitchen towel and gently dabbed up the excess oil...and to my happy surprise it also had the effect of smoothing over the topping much better than my previous efforts had managed. Phew! Not perfect but disaster averted.

Oh and yes, don't be a dipsy like me if you go for 2 loaves, you'll need to add more chocolate to the topping. It didn't occur to me till way too late that with 2 cakes there was more surface area to cover than with the single 2lb loaf (well duh!), hence coverage was a little patchy.

So, the topping worked quite well in the end, it tastes good and looks pretty with the cocoa dusted over the top - and no, believe it or not I didn't notice that HUGE gap along the edge that I'd missed with chocolate until I saw the photo! However, if you want an easy life or get phased by things looking scarily bad until you've put some work in to fixing it (which sadly is pretty normal for me as I mess with recipes so much they nearly always don't go to plan, hehe) then I'd stick with normal milk or dark chocolate which is easier to work with.

One last thing. My loaves both rose in the middle and cracked open a bit, while the original Sweet & Simple picture shows a nice level loaf. I'm not sure if the lighter sweetener meant it rose more but feh, I think they look nice and rustic and as I mentioned before, I nearly left the topping off entirely because I thought they looked so nice.

This isn't a hard recipe however it does have several stages so it's not a particularly quick affair to make (and oh boy am I glad I have a dishwasher). It's definitely a keeper and very yummy (both 'him indoors' and my work mates all made comment unprompted about how good it was) - I'm looking forward to making it again, I bet it would be divine with hot custard as a desert too :)

Anyhow without further ado, here's the recipe.

Chocolate Orange Drizzle Loaf Cake

175g butter or margarine (cubed)
175g caster sugar (I switched to half and half sugar & sweetner (ie Splenda or similar), this measures as just under a cup, 0.921 to be precise or weighed around 120g)
3 large eggs, beaten
Zest of 2 Oranges
175g self raising flour
2 Tablespoons of milk


1 Beat the butter and sugar together until it turns pale & creamy

2 Add in the egg a bit at a time, mixing well.

3 Stir in milk and zest then gently fold in sifted flour.

4 Split batter in to 2x1lb greased or lined loaf pans (I use silicon paper liners, they're brilliant!) and place in a pre-heated oven on Gas Mark 4/350 degree's for about 35 minutes or until it passes the toothpick test.

5 Leave to cool in pans or papers. When cooled use a toothpick or skewer to make little holes in the cake surface. This is to allow the syrup to soak through the crust.


Orange Syrup

Juice of 1 orange (I used closer to 2 as they are needed for the zest anyhow).
100g granulated sugar (I just went for 75g as it seemed plenty)

1 Place orange juice and sugar in a pan and gently heat until sugar dissolves. Stirring constantly bring to the boil for a couple of minutes for it to reduce a bit. It's frothy man! (Oh boy, really showing my age there, haha!)

2 Spoon over cake(s) immediately before it cools and thickens and once it's finished soaking through you can remove from pans/papers.


Chocolate topping

50g dark or milk chocolate (I used white)
(10g Mascarpone to make it more spreadable, needed more though!)
Sprinkles of choice - optional (I dusted with cocoa powder)

1 Melt the chocolate and Mascarpone and mix well. Be careful when doing this - white chocolate goes a very strange texture at the best of times when melted but is more prone to over-heating than regular chocolate.

2 Using a spatula or spoon, spread the chocolate evenly over the top of the cake. As I was working with white chocolate I also had to pat it down after with a kitchen towel to take out some of the excess oil and help smooth it further.

3 Dip a dry pastry brush into the cocoa, hold a few inches above the cake and lightly tap, dusting the powder lightly over the top.