Chocolate orange cake

I rarely bake for myself, meaning for my own benefit. I bake for my loved ones, what they like to eat. I bake for other people, most people that come to my house end up eating cake and I like that, it is homely, welcoming and comforting.

It was a bit of treat to bake something just for me, to be truthful the reason I decided to do this was, after a disagreement with my OH I decided to annoy him and please myself by baking a favourite of mine, that he just happens to hate, chocolate orange cake. Revenge is sweet, even more so when it's sugar sweet.

I find it so strange that anyone can not like the combination of chocolate and orange, the flavours merge together brilliantly but my OH can't stand the two together.

Baking is my ME time, I love nothing more than pottering around the kitchen rustling up delicious goodies, but it was more pleasurable when the sole purpose of this was for my own pleasure.

Looking through my books I found only a couple recipes for chocolate orange cake, both from Nigella but neither did it for me, one was a store cupboard cake using a jar of marmalade and the other was based on Nigella's famous clementine cake, I didn't like the clementine cake last time and to be honest the idea of boiling oranges for hours on end didn't interest me. So I went it alone, I decided on a plain loaf cake, the best, darkest cocoa I could find and for the orange I used freshly squeezed orange juice and orange zest.

Chocolate orange cake

250g self raising flour

225g butter

175g caster sugar

50g good quality cocoa

3 large eggs, beaten

juice and zest of 3 large oranges

juice of 1 lime

Preheat the oven to 180c

Line a 2lb loaf tin.

In a mixer combine the flour, butter, sugar, cocoa and eggs.

Stir in the freshly grated orange zest.

Pour in the orange and lime juice. Mix well.

Pour into the prepared tin, bake for 1, 1/4 - 1, 1/2 hours.

A very simple recipe, and a very simple but delicious cake. Super moist, this cake was perfect with a cup of tea.

The orange flavour however wasn't as strong as I would have liked, it was very subtle, I thought adding the lime juice would have helped bring out the orange flavour, next time I think I would add a splash of cointreau or maybe a drop of orange oil...but still a wonderful treat for myself.