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At Marina Beach

After making a few lemon drizzle cakes and lime cakes in my time, I wanted to adapt the recipe to work for orange. And if you have orange, you of course need something to partner its flavour – that would be the dark chocolate drops then.

Ingredients

• 175gm of caster sugar
• 175gm of self-raising flour
• 175gm of butter
• 100g of dark chocolate drops
• 3 large eggs
• 2 table spoons of caster sugar for the drizzle
• 1 large orange – grate the zest for the cake, and keep the juice for the drizzle.

Here goes…

Pre-heat the oven to 180c (fan-assisted).

Mix the caster sugar and butter.

Mix in the flour and the eggs – add half of each, then mix, then repeat with the remaining flour and eggs. If you add it all at once, you'll get a very lumpy mix. Not good.

Mix in the zest.

Gently fold in the chocolate drops.

Pour into a cake tin, then bake for 50-60 minutes.

Fo' drizzle

The cake's done, you've checked that it's really baked (using a skewer or small knife, and the poke-test)…

To make the drizzle, simply add the orange juice and the 2 tablespoons of caster sugar into a pan, and gently heat until the sugar's dissolved.

While the cake's still warm, pierce the top of the cake in several places, then drizzle the drizzle evenly over the cake.

Then eat

Suggested accompaniments:

• Tea
• Gin and tonic
• Friends

Here's a photo of the finished cake, showing off its moist innards in graphic close up. (The one in the background is my girlfriend's ginger cake)

Got a favourite cake recipe? Can you do better? Share it!

I found this a little funny.

Got an interesting pet? Let's see it!

A very welcome Indian summer in London. Photo of me by Pardeep of Likeourselves, who I met for an afternoon catch up, that turned into an summer's evening of gin and tonic, and eating with friends up on the terraces of the National Theatre. Understand that in London, such fine weather is rare, so we really appreciate it when it happens.

By night, when the air had cooled, the National Theatre radiated its reserves of daytime heat, keeping us warm. The world's largest storage heater?!

And the photo here? On the way out, when it was too late to get changed, I realised that I was decked in various shades of green. I like green, but had not expected to head out looking like a modern Irish leprechaun.