Chocolate Orange Drip Cake!

How's this for a beauty! 

It's been a while since I had a go at a drip cake, and honestly this one caused me quite a bit of stress! But that's hardly surprising, given that this cake consists of six layers of orange flavoured chocolate fudge cake, and is filled and coated with a chocolate orange buttercream! The first attempt at the sponge didn't exactly go to plan, so let's get into it! 

My first plan was to follow the recipe for Chocolate Orange Drip Cake from Jane's Patisserie... but my bloody oven went haywire! The sponges were supposed to take an hour to bake, however they were burnt in just under half an hour. Not good, but I know my oven so I really should know better by now. Therefore, I really needed a Plan B. 

I decided to go for a fudge cake instead, as even if the cake baked slightly faster than I expected, I find that fudge cake has a tendency to stay moister for longer. To prepare the fudge cake, I followed the recipe for Chocolate Fudge Cake from the Finch Bakery book! To start, melted butter, vegetable oil, and eggs are whisked together with caster sugar, soft brown sugar, and vanilla extract. Then, a mixture of boiling water, cocoa powder, coffee powder, and salt is whisked in. Finally, flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda are gently folded in. The resulting batter is very liquid before it goes into the oven, but the resulting fudge cake is insane! I always reserve a little of the batter to make a few individual cupcakes, this way I can test the taste and texture of the finished sponge! 

With the sponges out of the oven and cooling it was time to start on the chocolate orange buttercream! What I love about Jane's Patisserie's recipes is how easy her buttercreams are to adapt. By simply beating together butter and icing sugar, and then adding melted chocolate orange, you end up with one of the best buttercreams I've ever tasted! 

Assembling the cake was something of a stress. I always struggle to level cakes properly, and the sponges were very delicate. But I ended up with six sponges that were as uniform as I was going to get them without them breaking apart. By alternating layers of sponge and buttercream, the cake started to come together!

Because you know I love a 
cross-section! 

After coating the cake in more of the chocolate orange buttercream, and allowing it to chill, I prepared a chocolate ganache drip by pouring almost-boiling double cream over both milk and dark chocolate, allowing the ganache to cool, and pouring it on the cake to create the drip. I then used the remaining frosting to pipe a border on top of the cake, and to pipe swirls onto the cupcakes, no point in letting either the cupcakes or the icing go to waste! To finish, I used chocolate orange segments and various chocolate sprinkles/pearls to decorate the cake! 

And then I was done! The only thing I can think to criticise here is the top sponge layer. For some reason the other layers had pulled away from the sides of the tin, but the top one didn't. The fact that the top layer was ever so slightly wider meant that when it came to smoothing down the sides of the cake I struggled to get more than the semi-naked look on that one layer, but seeing as I used a chocolate drip on the cake I wasn't too fussed. 

Gibby x