Orange you glad I made it?

So, more oranges. This time, not because they tempted me while carelessly arranged on the greengrocer's aisles, but rather because a family friend dumped a sackful on my mother's table and she wasn't sure what to do with them.

Well, where there's a fruit, there's a recipe.


Actually, all I did was modify my Grapefruit Yogurt Cake recipe to make it an Orange Mini-Cake with Chocolate Drizzle recipe.

How? Simple, substitute orange zest for grapefruit zest. Use orange extract instead of vanilla, but instead of 1/2 teaspoon, use only 1/4 teaspoon. I also baked the cakes in a mini-muffin pan for 30 mins, as opposed to a loaf pan for 50 mins. Came out fine.

As for the syrup, it is the following:

Ingredients
1 cup of fresh orange juice
2 tbsp of sugar
1 tsp of orange blossom water (optional)

Directions
Mix together all ingredients, bring to a boil then reduce to a simmer until the mixture is slightly syrupy. Cool before use.

To assemble, just place the mini-cakes in a shallow baking dish and brush on the cooled syrup until all the syrup is gone. Let the cakes stand for about 30 mins to absorb the remaining syrup and completely cool.

As for the chocolate drizzle, well whatever you like to use is fine, but a good simple recipe is simply melting 1/2 cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips in your microwave and mix until smooth. I like to add a little vegetable oil to make it glossy and not coagulate too quickly.

I used three oranges in this recipe - nine more to go!