The Brick Castle: Chocolate Orange Cake with Duerr's and Oxo Good Grips

This is the last of my 4 posts with Duerr's Preserves, and I'm sad to see them end. I've really enjoyed the easy and fun recipes - and so have my family! They're all definitely going to feature in the future. The short, clear 'how-to' videos are excellent, don't use any fancy language or equipment, so they're genuinely achievable.

Todays recipe was Chocolate Orange Cake, the most complicated of the 4 recipes, yet still very easy to do and containing everyday ingredients that you can pick up in any small supermarket.

The wet mix doesn't need to be perfect - it will look a bit 'greasy' but that'll vanish when you add the flour. When you add the Orange zest then it takes seconds with a zester, or ages if you remove it with a potato peeler and cut it into strips like I used to until Oxo sent me a Lemon Zester.

At only £6 I'm an idiot for never buying one because it's so much easier and especially at this time of year when we add zest to a lot of wintry and spicy dishes, it's incredibly handy.

The trickiest part of this dish is spreading the chocolate sauce evenly down the sides of the cake - and that's not hard. I whipped up the remainder of my pot of double cream with a tablespoon of icing sugar and spread it in the middle of the cake with the Duerr's marmalade instead of using apricot jam, as the cake was for a special person and they're not a fan of apricots.

I also decorated it with some chocolate orange buttons from Silver Spoon.

And candles....when I said it was for a special person, it was my daughter's birthday cake!

And very lovely it was too! The Duerr's marmalade has a good flavour and is quite tangy without being tart, so it goes incredibly well with the dark chocolate without being bitter. The cake is moist and rose well, so it's not too dense.