Dark chocolate and Orange Cake

With the help of Julia and Mel, we decided to surprise Lisa for her 21st birthday by baking a cake. We made a dark chocolate and orange cake based on this recipe, but altered the recipe to suit the ingredients we had

Ingredients

Cake

1 small navel orange

1 lemon

100g dark chocolate, broken into pieces

3 eggs

1 cup caster sugar

240ml vegetable oil

2 cups plain flour

1½ tsp baking powder

Ganache

200g dark chocolate

½ cup cream

Caramelised orange slices

1 Navel orange

Dash of honey

Caster sugar

We followed the original recipe for the method, but we found that the ganache curdled REALLY QUICKLY. One minute it was perfect and smooth, and suddenly it became totally lumpy and ugly. We also reduced the given amount of sugar (original recipe asked for 2.5 cups...why, just...why) and removed the 1 tablespoon of cocoa powder (wasn't worth buying an entire pack of cocoa powder just for 1 tablespoon). Since my cake tin is also really old and no amount of greasing prevents the cake from sticking, we had to line the tin with baking paper. This basically made the cake really ugly on the sides, and since our ganache was a bit of a failure, we didn't have enough to hide the sides of the cake. Julia is responsible for the caramelised oranges so I don't actually have a clue how to make them - but they were definitely my favourite part of the cake!

Here's the final product:

The birthday girl ate like a third of the cake on her own so I'm guessing it was really good...I had a few bites and it definitely wasn't very sweet but I guess if you're gonna eat a third of a cake that's probably a good thing. Overall an ugly success!