Thrifty Recipe of the Week: £1.44 Chocolate Orange Cake

Yes, you read that right: this humungous and very delicious chocolate cake costs just £1.44 to make.

It is one of my thrifty adaptations of a Nigella recipe: in this case, the Store-Cupboard  Chocolate-Orange Cake from How To Be A Domestic Goddess. The first time I made this chocolate cake, I was sold on Nigella’s pitch:

A different sort of chocolate cake: the sort you can make in a few minutes once you get home from work. Hardly any trouble, and you’ve got a gorgeously aromatic cake either for pudding or just to eat, as supper in its entirety, in front of the television.

CHOCOLATE CAKE FOR DINNER? If I must… Everything Nigella says here is true. However there are three other things I love about this particular cake:

1. You will probably have the ingredients in the kitchen already.
2. Hardly any washing up: a bowl, a saucepan, a couple of utensils and the cake tin.
3. Did I mention that my own, tasty version of this chocolate cake costs only £1.44?

The secret to this cake? A jar of value marmalade. At the time of writing, a jar of this costs just 27p from all the major supermarkets (a value marmalade cartel?) – and you’ll only use 18p‘s-worth. The other key ingredient you’ll need is a big 100g bar of value dark chocolate. This costs just 30p from all the major supermarkets (yep, definitely some price-fixing going on here).

In all honesty, I wouldn’t usually recommend value dark chocolate for a chocolate cake. I’m a choc snob. For this cake, however, it works perfectly well – I suspect that because this is a chocolate orange cake rather than a plain chocolate cake, you can get away with it.

The most expensive ingredient is half a packet of unsalted butter, which comes to 40p if you shop at Aldi (and 45p at the other supermarkets). The recipe also calls for two eggs (27p if you buy a carton of 15 mixed weight eggs), 150g self-raising flour (5p if you buy value self-raising flour), 150g caster sugar (22p), a pinch of salt and a couple of teaspoons of icing sugar (2p). All prices correct at the time of writing.

TOTAL: £1.44.

Here is the recipe:

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Chocolate Orange Cake

Rating  5.0 from 6 reviews

Prep time:  10 mins

Cook time:  50 mins

Total time:  1 hour

Serves: 8

Serving size: 8

A deliciously thrifty version of an old Nigella Lawson recipe.

Ingredients

• 125g unsalted butter
• 100g dark chocolate
• 300g value marmalade
• 150g caster sugar
• Pinch of salt
• 2 eggs
• 150g self-raising flour
• 2 tsp icing sugar
• 20cm cake tin, buttered

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees centigrade / 350 degrees fahrenheit / gas mark 4.
2. Melt the butter in a medium or large saucepan.
3. While the butter is melting, break the chocolate into pieces and beat the eggs.
4. When the butter has almost finished melting, add the pieces of chocolate. Remove from the heat and stir until the butter and the chocolate are a smooth melty goo.
5. Add the marmalade, caster sugar, salt and beaten eggs to the saucepan. Stir to mix.
6. Stir in the flour.
7. Add the cake mixture to your buttered tin and bake for 50 minutes. Test with a skewer - it will come out clean when the cake is cooked.
8. Allow to cool for 10 minutes before turning out.
9. Dust with icing sugar.

Notes

If you don't have a 20cm cake tin, use what you have and you will be fine. Bear in mind that if you use a smaller tin, the cake will take longer to cook in the middle and the top may crack. However a good dusting of icing sugar hides all manner of cakey blemishes 😉

3.5.3208