Chocolate Cake with Bitter Orange Marmalade

When I was in Rome last month, my mum had just finished making a batch of bitter orange marmalade. I sneakily put a jar in my suitcase and brought it back to London to make Chocolate Cake with Bitter Orange Marmalade.

My mum makes amazing jams and marmalades, something I have yet to try doing myself. Back home in Rome we have a garden with fruit trees so every summer my parents spend some time making jam. My dad is in charge of peeling and slicing the fruit, my mum boils it and makes the jam. The whole process takes days, as they usually have large quantities of fruit to go through! Our friends and neighbours sometimes bring crates of fruit from their gardens, as it happened with these bitter oranges.

The marmalade is too bitter for my taste to eat it straight out of the jar or spread on toast. I had to come to other ways of using it. My mum suggested pairing it with chocolate and I loved the idea of a dark chocolate / bitter orange combo. I decided to make my own version of a Sacher Torte, adapting a recipe from Jul’s Kitchen blog.

Ingredients

• 100g unsalted butter, softened
• 35g + 110g caster sugar (used at different stages of the preparation)
• 1 tbsp honey
• 6 egg yolks
• 1 whole egg
• 2 egg whites
• 125g milk or dark chocolate
• 100g plain flour, sifted

For the filling

• 100g bitter orange marmalade (this measure is approximate, you can really use as much as you like!)

For the decoration

• 100g dark chocolate

Preparation

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Melt the milk chocolate at bain-marie, then leave it to cool down.

Beat the egg yolks with 35g of sugar, one tablespoon of honey and one whole egg. Pour in the melted chocolate and softened butter.

In another bowl, beat the egg whites with 110g of sugar, for a few minutes, until they turn white and fluffy. Slowly fold the egg whites into the cake mix.

Sift the flour and add it to the mix. Pour the cake mixture in a greased cake tin. Bake in the oven for approximately 20 minutes.

Take the cake out of the tin and leave it to cool down on a wire rack.

Slice the cake in half horizontally and spread the marmalade over one layer. Top it up with the other cake layer.

Melt the dark chocolate and pour it over the cake.

Serve warm. It’s delicious with a scoop of clotted cream ice-cream!