Okay. Confession time.
Until very recently, I hated the chocolate/orange flavour combination. HATED. Yuck. Gross.
Hey, everyone has foods they don't enjoy eating. Olives, anchovies, aubergines and mushrooms seem to be the most common culprits. Sometimes they're lifelong aversions that you just can't shake off. Other times you can teach yourself to like something if you try it often enough. Then there's the situation where you've tried something, hated it, avoided it for ages, been forced into trying it again and…. kinda sorta maybe liked it just a bit! Such is the story of Sophie and all the chocolate/orange flavoured things. It was one of the only foods I never had any interest in. Why ruin chocolate with an overpowering citrus-y taste?
Then I had a Jaffa cake. I don't even remember the circumstances under which I made the momentous decision to try one, but I'm glad I did. I've had a lot more Jaffa cakes since then. Some might say too many not enough. Those little bastards are just too easy to eat! Now I even enjoy those Cadbury's chocolate oranges. Eating one of those is part of the UK citizenship test, right? My transformation is almost complete!
So when I saw the recipe for a chocolate orange cream cheese pound cake on Joy The Baker's blog, I thought…. Why the hell not?
Joy's baking blog is the one of the first food blogs I came across. She comes up with some pretty wacky combinations (peanut butter bacon cookies anyone?). I'm a massive fan of pound cake, and have made a fair few of her pound cake recipes, including a very green and very delicious avocado pound cake. Since avocado is totally a fruit, it definitely belongs in cake! No hating. Anyway, while I was vegan, most of Joy's recipes were sadly off-limits, and I'm super duper happy that this is no longer the case!
Let the pound caking begin!
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| I beat the crap out of some butter and cream cheese.... |
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| I had to sample quite a bit of this. For quality control. |
Oh yeah. This recipe requires a stand mixer, or at the very least a hand blender. I own neither of those things. There's a surprise! But I didn't let that hold me back. After all, pound cakes existed before stand mixers, right? So, two words: Elbow. Grease. If you have a bit of extra time, love chocolate/orange, and enjoy a good arm workout whilst pondering your life choices (especially how they have left you unable to afford a mixer), then I highly recommend giving this a try!
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| It was dark by the time I got around to photographing the finished product. |
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| Next time, more chocolate chips! |
If I had any residual misgivings about chocolate and orange together, this cake has managed to banish them forever.
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