Chocolate Orange Meltdown Cake

Whilst I wait 1 1/2 hours for my pork ribs to simmer I thought I’d share with you my latest BB. That’s ‘Baking Balls-up’.

It was looking good, and in fact, if I had been in the right mood,  I could have passed this one off as a deliberate creation. I could have called it Chocolate Orange Melt-in-the-Middle Cake. But I cannot lie. Ask the wife. I come out in a cold sweat and start stammering.

Nothing much wrong with this right? Wrong…

What I liked about this recipe is that it contains a whole orange. The whole thing. Boiled and whizzed to a mush. Had to try that. What I didn’t like was that, despite following the instruction meticulously, it didn’t cook in the middle. It was all fudgy and molten, like one of those self-saucing chocolate puddings I’ve never made. You may well be thinking, ‘So what, it’s chocolate, you could eat it raw’, and of course you’re right. But I do like to moan so there you go.

Anyway, to create this you will need (courtesy of BBC Good Food)

• 1 orange (the recipe says a seville but I couldn’t find one so just got a really big orange)
• a little melted butter, for greasing
• 100g plain chocolate, broken into pieces
• 3 eggs
• 280g caster sugar
• 240ml sunflower oil
• 25g cocoa powder
• 250g plain flour
• 1½ tsp baking powder
• orange decorations (mine were candy and orange sugar dust)

For the chocolate ganache

• 200g plain chocolate, broken into pieces
• 225ml double cream

First prepare the orange. Skewer it.

Boil it (30 mins)

Whizz it.

Now melt the chocolate (in a bowl over some simmering water) and leave to cool slightly. Combine the eggs, oil and sugar and orange pulp in a bowl.

Stir in the melted chocolate.

Add the dry ingredients and combine. Pour into a springform 9 inch tin greased and lined with baking paper.

Bake at 180 centigrade for at least 40 mins. If it starts to catch on the top cover with foil. Once you think it’s done remove from the oven and leave to cool. In the past I’ve done the thing where it’s cooked if you skewer it and it comes out clean but then I ended up with a dried out cake. So I ignored that and took a punt that the cake would keep cooking for a while once I took it out. But it didn’t.

Prepare the ganache by bringing the cream to a boil, pouring it into a bowl and then adding the chocolate.

Leave for a minute or two and then stir to combine.

The ganache desperately tried to split but using sheer force of will I didn’t let it. Spread the chocolate goo all over the cake.

Sprinkle with things.

So what’s the problem? Check the collapsed gooey middle…

But amazingly no one seemed to care…