Chocolate cake gets turned up a notch with this cake that actually creates its own sauce as it bakes! A sort of self-saucing lava cake. Serve it alongside a marmalade cream and you’ve got yourself a yummy cake indeedy! A mixture of baked sponge, that slowly becomes more molten the lower you go as it is sat in a chocolate sauce whilst baking, truly delicious! The sauce does firm up once fully cooled so eat it still warm from the oven or warm again in the microwave.
How to make a self-saucing chocolate orange cake with marmalade cream
Pre-heat your oven to 180C/160fan/gas4 or equivalent. First add the dry ingredients together for the cake – the flour, sugar, cocoa, orange zest, salt & baking powder. Just give it a stir together so it is one consistent dry mix.
Now take the wet ingredients. Melt the butter in a microwave on short blasts, then add together with it in a separate bowl mix the juice of the orange, eggs, milk and marmalade. Stir together until once consistent mixture, try to get some of the marmalade lumps out if you can.
Whisk the wet ingredients into the dry together until one smooth batter is formed, making sure to scrape all the dry ingredients up from the bottom of the bowl as it can hide away. Add in the chunks of chocolate and stir through again.
Grease a large deep baking dish (approx 2litres) with some extra butter and pour in the batter. In a seaparte bowl carefully mix together the water, sugar and cocoa until one consistent mixture and pour it over the cake batter in the tin carefully. If you want to make individual ones, grease some ramekins or smaller oven proof dishes – good for portion control!
Bake for 40 minutes, the cake should be lovely and firm on the outside, if it catches too soon during baking add tin foil on top to prevent it burning but do give it the full baking time.
Whilst it’s baking whip the cream using an electric whisk in a clean bowl, until stiff peaks form, add in the orange juice and zest to taste plus the marmalade and whisk through until combined. Keep chilled.
When the baking time is up, remove from the oven and allow to cool to room temperature just still slightly warmed scooping out big chunks of sponge with the chocolate orange sauce beneath and serving the cream alongside, top with some more orange zest if you want, but you may just want to eat it up!