Mary's Chocolate Orange Tart - GBBO Bakealong

Chocolate week on Great British Bake Off would once have seen me coming up with some elaborate creation, no doubt a lavishly decorated cake. But I don’t have the luxury of a lot of time any more and wasn’t really in the mood for cake - I fancied making a dessert that would keep for a couple of days. It seemed appropriate to use a GBBO recipe book and having a flick through, I settled on Mary Berry's chocolate orange tart from the Great British Bake Off Big Book of Baking.

The chocolate filling is a mixture of chocolate, sugar, butter, flour and eggs - so it's no wonder that it seemed quite cake-y to me. But the trick is not to overbake it and leave it slightly wobbly in the centre - I always have my mum's voice in the back of my mind at times like that, warning me that it isn’t cooked (or half raw, as she would probably put it) which explains why my brownies are usually overbaked! 

There is also an orange filling that you make in a similar way but using egg yolks not whole eggs, white chocolate, and the grated zest of one orange. But for some reason oranges were completely out of stock on my online shop that week (perhaps as we go into lockdown in winter, people are worried they will get scurvy?!) so I made do with a few drops of orange essence instead.

The idea is to swirl the two fillings together inside your pastry case to create a marbled effect. I think this looks quite pretty, don't you?

It is delicious served warm and also very good served cold a day or two later - if it lasts that long!

Chocolate Orange Christmas Bundt Cake

This cake is delicious and a special treat at any time of year but especially at Christmas where chocolate oranges are often a popular gift (though I also asked for a Terry's chocolate orange at Easter some years!).

I had decided to make it before finding out I had gestational diabetes and still wanted to bake the cake, as I was planning to take it to my brother in law's on Boxing Day for everyone to eat anyway - it's not like I was going to eat the whole cake myself. Depending on my blood sugar readings and what else I've had I may be able to have a very small piece of it anyway - the diabetes midwife did say it wasn't a case of not being able to ever have anything sweet, but it has to be a small amount on rare occasions.

Terry's chocolate oranges are, as I said, pretty iconic at Christmas. A month or so ago Tesco had a really good offer of 3 for the price of 1 (no that's not a typo) so I think I paid £3 for three. I decided at the time to give my husband one for Christmas and use the other two for baking.

I thought the chocolate orange slices would look great across the top of a bundt and that the cake itself should be chocolate orange flavour. I'd like to be able to say I developed my own recipe but these days I'm so busy preparing for the baby as well as doing everything else, and I am very tired all the time - I actually baked three different things today and had a nap in between as well! So I used a recipe I found online at Marsha's Baking Addiction.

 

It was easy to make and delicious (according to my husband who ate the offcuts when I levelled the cake) - really moist and you can taste the orange with the chocolate. I definitely recommend this recipe!

 

The cake came out of my Nordicware bundt tin easily after I sprayed it with PME Release A Cake Spray 600 ml - sometimes I've had problems with cakes sticking in my metal bundt tins but I really wanted to use it because the ridges around the cake are beautiful and I thought would be perfect for this particular cake.

To decorate the cake once it had cooled, I melted a whole Terry's chocolate orange (broken into segments) and stirred in about 50 ml double cream.

I planned to pour this over the top of the cake but it was still a bit thick so I spooned and spread it into the ridges, and topped each one with another piece of chocolate orange (using half of another one so you need one and a half in total). As a final touch I added some Dr. Oetker gold pearls.

 

I'm pleased with the way it turned out and my husband loved how it tasted so I hope the family enjoy it on Boxing Day!

I'm sharing this with We Should Cocoa hosted by Tin and Thyme and Cook Blog Share, hosted by Recipes Made Easy.

Hoxton Street Monster Supplies Cookbook Giveaway and Halloween Chocolate Orange Tart

 

 

I've got a great giveaway just in time for Halloween where not one, not two, but three of you can win a spooky cookery book full of recipes and ideas for party food for Halloween and any sort of horror-themed party (movie night?) you might want to hold at any time of the year.

The Hoxton Street Monster Supplies Cookbook is worth £13 and is a beautifully illustrated 160 page hardback cookbook with over 70 recipes and humorous advice for entertaining.

Hoxton Street Monster Supplies claims to be London’s "and quite possibly the world’s only purveyor of quality goods for monsters of every kind." All profits go to the Ministry of Stories, a creative writing and mentoring charity for young people which looks absolutely brilliant; I would have loved something like this when I was a kid and am going to look into signing up as a volunteer.

The cookery book says it is a revised edition featuring recipes suitable for humans, but has plenty of advice for what to do if you are inviting the undead to your party - allow extra time for zombies to eat dinner as they tend to be very slow; never seat a cyclops next to a giant spider (cyclops are sensitive about the fact that they only have one eye) and so on.

Recipes are divided into chapters: sweets and pastilles (including crunching bone toffee and fairy brain fudge), biscuits and cookies  (phlegmy dodgers, gingerdead men and toenail macaroons), cakes and bakes (clotted blood cakes, fresh maggot brownies, which I couldn't bring myself to make, and spiced earwax pie, which looked like treacle tart from the recipe), jams and curds (including human snot curd and pickled eyeballs), savoury snacks (chunky vomit dip, small intestine skewers) and potions and poisons (eg satanic smoothie).

The recipe for brain cake, or rather 'braaaiiiinnnn cake', made me laugh - translated for use by zombies. The recipe runs: "Oooooooog. BBBRRRAAAIIINNNNS! Brraaaauuuunnnnns. AAR! Errrrrg" and so on. So I won't be attempting that one.

If you can get past the slight sense of revulsion that I felt when reading the names of some of the recipes (yes I know they are not serious but some are just gross!) and read the introduction to each recipe they are really funny - and I can assure you that the recipes contain perfectly normal ingredients! I think this would go down really well with children in particular so if you fancy being in with a chance to win a copy of the book scroll down to the end.

 

The giveaway is open to UK addresses only and the books will be sent to the winners directly by the publishers.

I decided to make one recipe from the book so I could review it, and since it was over a week until Halloween and I wasn't about to throw a party I decided to make one of the most normal sounding recipes: Night Terror Torte. This is basically a chocolate and orange tart, using a ready-made sweet shortcrust pastry base.

You slice two oranges and cook them in a sugar syrup (mixture of sugar and water); bake the pastry case blind and then make the filling from ground almonds, butter, sugar and eggs then dark chocolate. Add some of the orange slices which you have chopped while keeping the rest for decoration, and bake the assembled tart in the oven.

 

raw:

 

 

cooked

 

 

scroll down for the giveaway- starting at midnight tonight!

 

 

 

 

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Chocolate Fondue Bundt Cake

This recipe is from an idea I saw on The Pink Whisk and I want to give a giant nod to her and encourage you to visit her site. It’s such an original idea I can’t claim any credit for it, but it was so good I wanted to make it and share a picture with you all. This is a great recipe to share with friends particularly if you are having a dinner party on new year’s eve.

 

The idea is relatively simple but something I would never have thought of! Bake a bundt cake – a ring with a hole in the middle – make a chocolate ganache, and pour the liquid chocolate into the hole in the middle of the cake. Slice off chunks of cake and dip into the chocolate, fondue style!

 

If you cut around the cake working from the outside in, you can leave a ring of cake that will keep the chocolate ganache contained. I also added marshmallows for dipping which looked pretty around the cake as well.

 

I used my own recipe for this and following a friend’s suggestion did a marble cake; I had some oranges to use up so decided to make a chocolate orange bundt cake. I can't quite remember where I got the recipe from but these are the quantities I used:

 

Chocolate orange fondue bundt cake

 

3 1/2 cups self-raising flour

pinch of salt

225g butter, softened

2 cups caster sugar

4 eggs

1 cup sour cream

zest and juice of 3 mandarin oranges (as I had some that needed using up - you could alternatively use one large orange)

1/2 cup cocoa powder

 

To make the chocolate ganache:

150g milk chocolate, chopped

200ml double cream

To serve: marshmallows

Grease and flour a bundt tin and preheat the oven to 180C.

Cream the butter and the sugar, and beat in the eggs.

Fold in the flour and sat and then the sour cream.

Separate half the mixture into another bowl and add the orange zest and juice to one and the cocoa powder to the other; mix well.

Place a spoonful of each mixture in turn around the bundt tin and repeat until all the mixture has been used.

 

Bake for around 45 minutes, checking with a skewer to see if the inside is cooked through. When cooked, remove from the oven and leave to cool then turn out of the tin.

 

 

Make the fondue by bringing the cream to a simmer in a saucepan and adding the chocolate. Stir until it melts and set aside to cool.

Meanwhile find a flat serving plate that the cake will sit on neatly and trim the bottom of the cake if necessary so it sits flat. Arrange marshmallows around the base of the cake along with anything else you want to dip into the fondue such as strawberries.

 Pour the chocolate ganache into the centre of the cake and serve!

 

 

 

 Dip the marshmallows into the fondue and slice the outer ring of the cake, leaving enough of the cake to form a ring to keep the fondue in the middle, and dip the cake in the chocolate as well.

 

 

 

This makes a great talking point and sharing dessert and is a great idea from The Pink Whisk!

 

I think this cake would be perfect for new year's eve so I'm sending it to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen.

 

 

 

Chocolate Orange Christmas Trifle

Thinking that I would have too much to do on Christmas day, I decided not to make a dessert and bought the frozen chocolate bar dessert that Heston Blumenthal designed for Waitrose. But at the last minute I found out I was having two extra guests for dinner on Christmas Eve - I had invited one but she hadn't replied, then called me to ask if when she came she could bring someone else - so I thought it would be nice to have something sweet for dessert that day. And I do like making homemade puddings!

A trifle is traditional at Christmas but I detest traditional trifles and I'm pretty sure my boyfriend doesn't like it either, so I started thinking about things we do both like - namely chocolate - and how I could incorporate this into a trifle. I also remembered I'd bought a Terry's chocolate orange when it was on offer at only £1 and put it in the cupboard intending to use it in baking or to decorate a cake. So I came up with this chocolate orange cheesecake: instead of trifle sponges it has a layer of chocolate brownie as the base, then a layer of orange jelly (to which I added some tinned mandarin oranges just to be a little bit traditional), and then a layer of chocolate orange mousse, topped with whipped double cream and decorated with Terry's chocolate orange slices.

Start by making the chocolate brownie base - it's a good idea to make this the day before you want to serve the trifle as the jelly, which goes on top, needs time to set. This is the recipe I used for the chocolate brownie; I found it made about twice the quantity that I needed (I'm not entirely sure of the capacity of my serving dish but I'd estimate about three litres or more) but that was fine because we enjoyed eating the leftover brownie!

Chocolate Brownie Base

The recipe came from BBC Good Food though I altered it slightly to use chocolate containing hazelnuts, which worked really well, and I didn't add the additional chopped milk and white chocolate.

You need:
185g butter
185g dark chocolate
85g plain flour
40g cocoa powder
3 eggs
275g caster sugar

Preheat oven to 175C. Melt the chocolate and half the butter in the microwave.

Sift the flour and cocoa powder into a bowl, beat in the eggs and sugar and then the chocolate, melted butter and the rest of the butter.

Grease and line a square 8 inch cake tin and pour in the mixture. Bake in the preheated oven for about 35 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. I needed to cook mine for a little longer as the mixture was quite deep in the tin. When the brownies were cooked, they were still lovely and fudgy in the middle.

Chocolate Orange Mousse Layer

My recipe was inspired by this one on All Recipes. You need:
4 eggs, separated
250g plain chocolate, melted
juice and grated zest of 1 orange

In a bowl whisk the egg whites until stiff. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks until fluffy then whisk in the melted chocolate. Then whisk in the orange zest and juice. Finally fold in the egg whites and place in the fridge to set.

To assemble the trifle

Break or cut up the chocolate brownie and place the pieces in the bottom of a serving dish. Make up an orange jelly according to the packet instructions and leave in the fridge for an hour or more until the jelly is still runny but just starting to set a little - this will prevent it all from soaking into the chocolate brownies. When you are ready, open a tin of mandarin orange segments and sprinkle over the top of the brownies then pour over the jelly. Leave in the fridge overnight to set.



Spoon the chocolate mousse once it has set on top of the jelly layer.

Whisk some double cream and spoon on the top and decorate with Terry's chocolate orange slices.

This is actually my entry to this month's Food 'n' Flix. Heather at Girlichef has chosen the film A Christmas Story, which is from 1983 and a classic, but I've never heard of it.

The film has several inter-connecting stories but the main one is about a little boy who wants a BB gun from Santa. To be honest I didn't like it that much - it's one of those 'family comedies' where you either need to be a kid or watching with kids to really enjoy it. I also found it quite dated - my idea of a Christmas movie is probably Love Actually and I don't tend to like any of the more schmaltzy older ones. But it seems this film is a staple on TV in America over Christmas and it is the sort of thing that I can imagine families gathered together and watching on Christmas Eve.

So my recipe inspired by the movie was always just going to be something Christmassy, so I am sending Heather my chocolate orange Christmas trifle.

Chocolate Box Birthday Cake

I asked my boyfriend what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday and he said chocolate. So I decided to go one better and make him a box of chocolates, in the form of cake! I had seen a few of these on the internet, including a very pretty one in a heart-shaped box for Valentine's day, but thought that a square box would look the most authentic.

You can use any chocolate cake recipe and make a square cake. I doubled the quantity and made two cakes that I could sandwich together with chocolate ganache.

I used some ready-to-roll fondant from Renshaw in teddy bear brown. Place the cake on a cake board and cut a strip of fondant to go around the base of the cake. It needs to be at least an inch wide or more if you prefer.

Next cover the top of the cake with a flat piece of fondant, then make a piece for each side. I mixed the fondant with a little CMC to make it stiffer; it helps if you leave it for about ten minutes after you've cut the piece out to harden slightly. The side pieces need to sit within the base so the base still sticks out a little, and they need to be about an inch higher than the top of the cake. Stick the pieces on with a little chocolate ganache.

Continue until all sides are complete.

You will need a selection of chocolates to go on top of the cake which you can either buy or make. I decided to make them myself, as I was sent these moulds to review by the Dot Com Gift Shop.

I have explained in a previous post how I made these chocolates which are like Rolos, and taste gorgeous.

I also explained in an earlier post how I made these heart-shaped cake balls.

My favourites from any box of chocolates when I was younger was always the orange cream slice, so I wanted to make some of these as well. I melted some Terry's chocolate orange in the microwave.

I had this orange segment mould that I picked up in the sale from Lakeland a while ago.

I decided to make a truffle centre for the chocolates, so I made a chocolate ganache from melted chocolate and double cream and a dash of Cointreau.

To make the chocolates, brush some melted chocolate - using either a silicon pastry brush or the back of a teaspoon - into the mould, leaving enough space in the middle to fill. Put in the fridge until set. Then add the filling - the Cointreau ganache - and melt some more chocolate. Allow the melted chocolate to cool a little then pour into the moulds to fill them. Refrigerate until required.

These have a wonderfully soft filling when you bite into them and taste delicious.

Finally I made some cake balls, exactly the same as cake pops without the sticks, by mixing crumbled cake trimmings from another cake I'd made the day before, with some buttercream. Roll into balls and dip into melted white chocolate and leave to set.

 I added a few Maltesers from a packet as well to fill in the gaps. Here's my collection of chocolates.

Arrange them all on top of the cake. The sides of the cake that you have made higher than the cake really do look like the edges of a box.

As a finishing touch I tied a large gold bow around the box. My boyfriend was really pleased when I presented this to him and it went down very well when his family came over; everyone had a slice of cake and a few of the chocolates from the top. My favourites were the 'Rolos' and orange slices. This cake does take a bit of effort and time but it really is worth it!