Chocolate Orange Cake for One

 

A while ago my sister, Allana, and I were talking about all the baking I've done for my blog and I expressed the difficulty of doing all this baking while being a single person.  I'm not complaining that the baking is a lot of work, quite the opposite I'm enjoying this culinary walk down memory lane immensely.  My issue is that when making a recipe that is sized for a family, and even sometimes multiple servings for a family, it takes an iron will for one person not end up the size of a house by having all the product of all that baking in her home.  And despite all my stubbornness an iron will is not something I possess.

This lead the conversation onto those cakes in a mug baked in the microwave recipes that are floating around the internet.  They seem ideal for a single person as they're one serving, I've tried a few of them, they're disgusting, either dry and mealy or slimy and rubbery, and baking them in the oven does little to improve them.  She asked me if I had come up with a recipe for one myself and while I do have a small cake that I make occasionally when I fancy a piece of cake but the smallest I've managed to get it down to is three servings.

With the distance of an ocean and a very large continent between us, we don't send each other many presents through the post as it's prohibitively expensive, the postage has often cost more than double the present.  So we buy presents or do very nice things for each other when we see each other and not on arbitrary dates like Christmas or birthdays, but since today is Allana's birthday I thought I'd do something for her, and this is it, I've developed the recipe for an amazing one person cake and made it wheat free since she has recently suspected that she might have a wheat intolerance.

Chocolate Orange Cake for One

Pre-heat the oven to 320^F (160^F)

In a bowl (either over a pan of simmering water or in the microwave) melt together
25g chocolate (about half a chocolate bar)
20g butter

Whisk in
30g light brown sugar
orange zest from 1/4 of an orange

Let the chocolate mix cool a bit then mix in
1 egg yolk

Fold in
30g ground almonds or hazelnuts - your preference
1/2 tsp cocoa powder (optional, if you use milk chocolate the cocoa powder will make the cake richer, if you used dark chocolate you can omit it)

Whisk up
1 egg white until soft peaks

Fold the egg white into the batter.

Pour the finished batter into a small baking dish that has been greased and dusted with cocoa powder, I used an old small nutella glass jar the size smaller than their trademark oval jar (200g).

Bake for 25 - 35 minutes, take it out when a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.

Once out of the oven take it out of the baking dish immediately to cool, this will help stop it collapsing down.

Cover with butter cream icing, you can melt down the other half of the chocolate bar and mix it into the icing to make it richer.  This isn't a 5 minute cake like the microwave ones, it actually takes just as long to bake this as it does a full size cake, so you have time to do things like make icing and in my case even candy the remaining peel from the orange.

My decorating skills aren't the best but I've always been of the school that taste is more important than appearance when it comes to baking.  It's a good little cake, well worth the effort to make, and hopefully worthy of being a birthday present.

* Edit *
Allana was so pleased with her present that she baked one right away!  She had a nifty little oval baking dish that worked perfectly.