Waitrose Great British Garden Party - My Chocolate Orange Cake ♥ - Victoria's Vintage Blog

I love a bit of baking and I also love a blogger challenge! I was recently contacted by Waitrose to take part in their Waitrose Great British Garden Party campaign, which is where they come up with loads of great foodie ideas for summer. I can’t believe we’re halfway through August already.. summer has come and gone so quickly! But determined to make the most of the remaining weeks, I took part in the challenge. The task was to create an authentic cake recipe which captures quintessential British flavours.

There are loads of cake recipes on the Waitrose website to take inspiration from, but I decided to go with my own idea; a Chocolate Orange Marble Cake. I picked this recipe because I wanted to use fruit in my bake as it is summer after all. I thought of doing a lemon cake, but I made one of those not long ago, so I thought I’d give an orange cake a first try. I’m a massive chocolate cake fan so I was keen to bake using cocoa, and so I made a marble cake to get the citrus flavour as well as the chocolate. Scrummy! So here’s how it was done…

Ingredients:

250g soft butter
250g caster sugar
250g self-raising flour
4 large eggs
2 tbsp milk
3 tbsp cocoa powder
Chocolate chips
1 large orange: zest and 1 tbsp orange juice
100g orange flavoured chocolate
Orange jelly sweets

Method:

To start off, you will need to heat
up your oven to 180oC and then grease and line the inside of your cake tin. I used a 7″ round tin for my cake. .
Beat the butter, sugar, eggs together in a large bowl with an electric whisk.
Fold in the flour using a spatula or wooden spoon.
Split
the mixture into two bowls. In one bowl of mixture, beat in the milk, followed by the cocoa powder. I also added to handful of chocolate chips to my mixture! Then beat the squeezed orange juice and grated zest into the other bowl of mixture.
Spoon
alternate dollops of the mixtures into the cake tin, then use a skewer
to create a marble pattern by dragging it through the mixture in swirls.
Bake the cake for 35-45 mins until golden and risen, and a skewer poked in comes out clean.
Leave
the cake in the tin to cool, then turn out.
For the topping, melt the chocolate and then drizzle over the cake. Top with orange jelly decorations and orange zest.

After decorating, my cake looked like this. I’m so pleased with how the marbling worked out! It was really easy to make, and the decorating was really simple to do. The cake was really nice and moist, and I really love the pattern on the inside. Yum yum! The perfect summer tea time treat.