I wanted to treat my friends this weekend – it’s been a long week so we deserved it! I was racking my brains for the perfect revision week bake when I decided to make a giant, gooey version of my boyfriend’s favourite revision week snack: The Jaffa Cake.
I found a recipe on the trusted BBC Good Food website, and after a read I decided it sounded doable. The cake is a dense, moist orange sponge, made with natural Greek yogurt, topped with a layer of orange jelly (I cheated and bought a packet mix) and then covered in a rich, creamy chocolate ganache.
It wasn’t until the cake was in the oven that I decided to read the comments – apparently it falls apart on assembly. And they were right! The cake came out the oven, and it looked and smelled delicious as I left it to cool. The top has to be painted with apricot jam – it’s supposed to act as a glue. Then, I carefully (and surprisingly) managed to flip the orange jelly out the cake tin in which I left it to set and on to the top of the cake. At that point, the jelly began to slip and slide off the top of the cake, even though I had turned the cake upside down so that it was perfectly flat! Nonetheless, I soldiered on and covered it in chocolate. Aesthetically, it was a disaster (please don’t mock the photo!) – my beautiful cake was now covered in a pool of chocolate mixed with jelly. I was pretty sad.
Luckily, never has the saying “never judge a book by its cover” been truer. Wow.The cake was moist, rich and had a deep orange flavour running through it. What’s more, it was a beautiful bright yellow colour as a result of the orange zest. The jelly was nothing special (24p for a packet mix…shhh…), but somehow it added a delicious freshness to the cake. And all that covered with melted chocolate ganache: mmmmm!!
I served it with ice cream. It made for a really delicious, rich, but fruity desert! If I were to make it again (which I will), I’d abandon the Jaffa Cake idea – if it weren’t for the jelly the cake would have tasted and looked like a beautiful chocolate orange sponge.
Find the recipe here: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/giant-jaffa-orange-cake
The Food Loving Dieter 