Chocolate Orange Cake

Happy Mother's Day!

I made this Chocolate Orange Cake for my mum and grandma yesterday. The cake is chocolate, dabbed with an orange syrup, filled with chocolate orange ganache and covered with orange buttercream.

I'm going to be honest, I wasn't entirely happy with this cake, it doesn't taste bad but not as good as I would've liked. Also the presentation was not what I had planned in my mind. I wanted to pipe a flower border but failed epically, resulting in covering the top with left over ganache.

During the baking of this cake, I almost had multiple hard attacks. The chocolate cake was this cake by Bake Noir (Martha Stewart Chocolate Cake). The batter was very liquid-y. I also had alot of it, since the recipe was for a 24cm cake and I only had two 20cm cake pans I also made 8 extra cupcakes. It was very nerve-racking putting the pans into the oven. I filled it to the top since my pans weren't very tall and I didn't want multiple thin layers but two thick ones. After 20 minutes I started to pat myself on the back. The cake was forming and the was level, but then..... oh yes, it rose. The cake domed. Oh WELL.

I made this cake a day in advance, wrapped it and placed it into the fridge [which also made trimming the tops of easier the next day]. The ganache was easy enough, I won't go too much into detail. But the buttercream. It called for corn flour, which I thought was strange but tried it anyway. I had way too much fun playing with it. As we all know from Doctor Who, corn flour is tough when it is penetrating forcibly but liquid when gently swirling it. Instead of resembling a thick custard, I found lumps of solid corn flour in the buttercream which eventually looked like curdled egg. So I scrapped that and made a simple Orange Buttercream which I doubled to cover the cake.

I decorated the sides with Lindt Dark Chocolate Intense Orange (it was on sale!) and topped it of with 5 little orange pieces. I was intially planning to candy them, but I got lazy. ah life...