Jo Lives To Eat

I thought it was high time to put my first recipe on my blog - I'm ashamed I haven't done it before now. Apologies.

So, I wanted to keep it simple to start - nothing too fancy and do a little baking.  Actually, something I feel quite strongly about is cake.  Yes, you might see a recurring theme here as I've already had my cupcake gripe in an earlier post but now I'm talking about good old fashioned cake.  Cakes are so easy to bake and I just don't understand how so many people get it wrong.  I've tasted so many that are either dry, artificial tasting or tasteless and there is just no need for it!

So I've decided to pass on a recipe for one of my favourite cakes in the whole wide world - chocolate orange cake and it takes minutes to prepare!

So the ingredients are as follows:
4oz of butter, 6oz of caster sugar, 6oz self-raising flour, 2 large eggs, 4 tablespoons of milk, 1 orange, 4oz of chocolate chips and a further 2-3oz of cooking chocolate (dark chocolate is best)

Start off by creaming the butter and sugar - you can use a spoon or a handheld whisk if you don't have a mixer but it will be harder to do if the butter is rock hard.

Once the consistency is nice and smooth beat the 2 eggs and add to the butter and sugar, then grate the orange rind into the mixture.


Next fold in the flour alternatively with the milk.  Once finished everything will have come together in a nice sticky and thick consistency. Before pouring into a cake tin add half of the chocolate chips into the mixture.
Finally pour the mixture evenly into a small cake tin (19cm) and pop the rest of the chocolate chips on top but don't mix them in.  This ensures that the chocolate chips are distributed evenly throughout the cake.


Put the tin into a pre-heated oven at 160 degrees for 45 minutes.  Thats it!!

Just before the cake comes out of the oven squeeze the juice from the orange into a saucepan with a little sugar and boil it up.  As soon as you take the cake out of the oven pour the juice all over the cake - this makes it all the more orangey and yummy.

Leave the cake to cool now for at least half an hour and then release it from the tin.  Melt the cooking chocolate up with some single cream and spread it all over the cake.  Delicious.  The best part is then licking the bowl!


So thats it.  Simple as and the cake is extremely moist, not too rich, very orangey and very chocolatey.  Anyone you bake this for will love you.  Believe me!