Chocolate-orange cake with ginger icing (GF)

This combination of chocolate, orange and ginger is delicious and reminds me of Christmas. The orange is quite subtle in this; if you don’t like chocolate-orange you can just not include the orange zest but if you love it you can always use more.

Cream cheese icing has got to be my favourite and I wanted to make another cake with a flavour profile that could carry it. This definitely works well. I adore ginger so it meant sense to me but if you don’t like it, you can omit it.

Ingredients:

150g soft unsalted butter

2 tbsp golden syrup

175g dark muscovado sugar

60g dark chocolate

Zest of half an orange and juice of 1 orange

150g gluten-free self-raising flour (I use Doves Farm)

A quarter tsp of xanthum gum

25g good quality cocoa powder

4 medium eggs (or 3 large)

Icing:

50g unsalted butter

60g Cream cheese (I used half-fat Philadelphia)

80g icing sugar

2 dsp ginger syrup (from stem ginger jar)

2–3 pieces of stem ginger

1x 900g/2lb lined loaf tin

Method:

Line or grease loaf tin and pre-heat oven to fan 170 degrees.

Cream together the butter, syrup, sugar and melted chocolate:

Add the zest of half an orange:

Mix the flour, xanthum gum and cocoa powder together:

Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet, adding one egg at a time:

Once combined, add the juice of the orange (don’t panic if it curdles):

Once combined, transfer the mixture to the lined tin:

…and bake on the bottom shelf of the oven for 40 mins or when the cake feels spongy to the touch (please note a cake-tester will not come out clean).

Allow to cool completely before icing.

Make the icing by combining the butter, ginger syrup and icing sugar. (My icing looks really runny in these pics as my icing sugar had gone lumpy, so to avoid lumpy icing, I melted the butter and icing sugar together.)

Then mix in the cream cheese:

…and refrigerate:

I iced my cake a bit too early (as I was getting inpatient) so the icing went a bit runny (apologies for the slightly dark/yellow lighting in these pics but it was a rather grey day):

Then finely chop the stem ginger and sprinkle on top:

The good news is that this cake lasts quite well. I suppose if you have quite a warm house or are making it in the Summer you may want to keep it in the fridge. The cake should be moist (which is why you don’t want your cake-tester to come out clean) with a slight hint of orange.