Chocolate Orange Cake

I promised I would post the recipe of the mini cakes I made for SisterLovlie’s birthday. They were quite moist and I flavoured the orange and chocolate batters separately.

I used soymilk in this cake; I’ve had a bit of soy in cakes lately and it hasn’t affected me so far! Could my intolerance to soy gradually disappear? I hope so! Probably the fact that I haven’t had any soy products for a long time has immunized my body against whatever substance I can’t tolerate in the soy. Well, I won’t get excited too soon though.

I made mini cakes and 2 slightly bigger cakes but I’ve adjusted the recipe to yield just 8 mini cakes. If you are using muffin tins, you might get more. I baked them in 10 cm or 3 inches diameter ramekins.

Ingredients (8 mini cakes)

Orange batter:

Dry mix:
1¼ cup self-raising flour
¾ teaspoon baking soda
⅓ cup demerara sugar
Pinch salt
1 tablespoon orange zest (grated from 1 orange)
¾ teaspoon turmeric (optional if you want a yellowy/orangey colour)

Wet mix:
75 ml melted margarine (I just popped the marg in the microwave until just melted but not boiled!)
75 ml soy milk (I would think other non dairy milk would be fine too, but I’ve never tried it)
75 ml orange juice (from one orange)
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
2 tablespoons vinegar

Chocolate batter:

Dry mix:
1¼ cup self-raising flour
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
¾ teaspoon baking soda
⅓ cup demerara sugar
Pinch salt

Wet mix:
75 ml melted margarine (I just popped the margarine in the microwave until just melted but not boiled!)
150 ml soy milk (I would think other non dairy milk would be fine too, but I’ve never tried it)
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
2 tablespoons vinegar

• Preheat oven at 180 degrees Celsius.

Mix the ingredients for the orange batter and chocolate batter separately in two bowls:

• For each, add the vinegar to the soy milk and let stand for a while.
• Meanwhile mix all the dry ingredients. Then add the rest of the wet ingredients to the soy milk and vinegar mixture.
• Stir gently and thoroughly mix all ingredients together.
• Pour an alternate layer of chocolate and white batter mix into the greased ramekins or cup cake tins. (If you want a marble effect, you could slightly mix the batter with a fork, swirling around. I left mine just layered).
• Bake for 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle of the cake comes out dry.

Here they are unglazed. They taste great even without any icing!

For the glazing:

Chocolate chips

Chocolate icing:
50 g – 75 g dark vegan chocolate broken to pieces
2-3 tablespoons water

• Place chocolate and water in bowl and microwave for 2 minutes or less until chocolate starts melt.
• Remove and stir vigorously to mix the water thoroughly to obtain a smooth pouring consistency chocolate sauce. Add more boiling water if the consistency is too thick.

• Alternatively, you could place the bowl of chocolate and water into another bigger bowl filled with boiling water and allow the chocolate to gently melt.

Orange icing:
Juice from half orange
Icing sugar

• In a bowl, mix orange juice with as much icing sugar as required to obtain a thick pouring consistency.

The mini cakes can either be glazed by dipping them head first into the bowl of chocolate or orange icing.

Then drizzle the chocolate iced ones with some of the orange icing and sprinkle the orange iced ones with some chocolate chips.