Cake
This One-Bowl Chocolatey Sponge Cake Looks Like It Came From a Bakery
Chetna Makan, columnist and former Great British Bake-Off contestant, shows us her signature no-fuss method.
On your mark, get set, bake! Food52 contributor and Great British Bake-Off contestant, Chetna Makan, is here to give us the lowdown on the kind of food she makes at home: simple, Indian-inspired weeknight wonders, showstopping sweets, and so much more.
When I was little, my mother would make our birthday cakes at home each year. They were nothing fancy: Just a single-tiered affair with no icing or anything remotely close to decorations. She took a couple of baking classes when I was very young, and there she picked up recipes like vanilla sponge, pineapple cake, and eggless date cake; these are the ones she made for us all the time. Despite their simplicity, those treats tasted amazing and gave me great joy.
As I got a little older, and into my teens, my mother would still bake for us, but we'd also buy beautiful cakes from a local bakery, adorned with swirls of cream and fine royal icing designs. I then took it upon myself to bake birthday cakes for all the family members, and tried my hand at decorating them with buttercream and candy to help make them look a bit more fancy. I but could never get quite close enough to the bakery's cakes, but instead, mastered some of the basics: vanilla sponges, basic royal icing, and vanilla buttercream.
I stopped baking for a while after that, going to university, studying fashion, then moving to the U.K. I had a very uncreative, boring job—but somehow I needed to make things. Having a huge sweet tooth, baking seemed like the natural way to go. So I got into it once again, beginning with simple cakes: Victoria sponge, coffee, and walnut, to start. I’d make them over the weekend on my days off. Then I became a mother and slowly found myself arranging coffee and cake mornings with other parents. This is when the baking started getting a bit more serious, as I found myself doing it more and more for my new friends.
Inspired to learn new techniques and recipes to bake, I got a subscription to BBC’s Good Food Magazine, one of the biggest food publications in the U.K. I remember trying recipes I thought were impossible, like Swiss rolls, and even started making up recipes of my own, like a raspberry, mascarpone cream, and amaretto concoction that my friends still remember to this day.
But all this while, I knew I ultimately wanted to bake for my two kids—just as my mum did for me. So I started challenging myself with their birthday cakes in particular: Every year, I would choose a design or idea that was a bit more complicated than the previous year, using fondant to shape them into the kids’ desired designs. This meant things like cars, dinosaurs, castles, fairy houses, you name it. Eventually, the kids realized that fondant icing was actually sickly-sweet and overpowered the delicate cakes underneath. So they began requesting other icing options, like buttercream, Italian meringue buttercream, and chocolate ganache. These more-sophisticated icings started covering more grown-up cakes: filled with hazelnut cream, Ferrero Rocher, lemon curd, and more.
Which brings me to this year: As usual, I asked my daughter to pick a flavor for her cake. She went for chocolate orange, in honor of one of her favorite holiday sweets. Though I had never made a cake like this before, I was very pleased to hear that she was after a more adventurous combination, and got to work on the recipe.
After a lot of playing around, I found that my signature one-bowl sponge would work beautifully. I've baked sponge cakes about a million times, but have found traditional recipes to be a bit fussier than I like: Most recipes ask for a whipping of egg yolks with sugar, separate whipping of egg whites to stiff peaks, melting of butter, and gentle incorporation of these wet ingredients with the dry ingredients. Baking is all about patience, and I have that in abundance. But after trying my hand at so many cakes, I wondered if I actually did need all these steps, or if an all-in-one approach would work. So some time ago, I tried combining the sponge cake's ingredients at the same time—wet and dry, all in one step—and have never looked back.
The key to a light sponge with this method is using ingredients that have all come to room temperature; this allows the batter to come together quickly and consistently. Make sure you have soft butter, which is best left out of the fridge the night before, room-temperature eggs, and room temperature milk, to start. After you get ingredients ready, the method's extremely easy: Everything goes into a stand mixer, where it’s whisked for two minutes. During this time, you’ll see the mixture change from a yellow color to much paler off-white, with a noticeably fluffier texture. The softened butter emulsifies with the sugar and flour and traps the air, making the sponge nice and light.
This method can be used with almost any flavor sponge—vanilla, lemon, peppermint, to name a few. Just mix up the extracts in the batter, or add finely ground spices (cardamom and cinnamon are some of my favorites). For this rendition, which is slightly orange-scented, I covered it with a silky, orange-flavored chocolate ganache. Good-quality dark chocolate mixed with chopped-up bits of Terry’s chocolate orange and cream makes for a lovely and rich icing that's not too sweet. I finish the cake with chopped toasted hazelnuts, to give some crunch; and as a reminder of my teenage cake-decorating years, I of course couldn’t resist decorating with pieces of Terry’s chocolate orange, too.
| 250 | grams unsalted butter, very soft (I take mine out of the fridge to soften overnight) |
| 1/2 | teaspoon table salt |
| 250 | grams golden caster sugar (plain caster sugar or light brown sugar work equally well) |
| 250 | grams self-rising flour (see note for substitution) |
| 1 | teaspoon baking powder |
| 2 | tablespoons whole milk, at room temperature |
| 1 | teaspoon orange extract (if you don't have this, use orange juice) |
| 1 1/2 | tablespoons orange zest (the zest from one medium navel orange, approximately) |
| 5 | large eggs, at room temperature |
| 250 | grams unsalted butter, very soft (I take mine out of the fridge to soften overnight) |
| 1/2 | teaspoon table salt |
| 250 | grams golden caster sugar (plain caster sugar or light brown sugar work equally well) |
| 250 | grams self-rising flour (see note for substitution) |
| 1 | teaspoon baking powder |
| 2 | tablespoons whole milk, at room temperature |
| 1 | teaspoon orange extract (if you don't have this, use orange juice) |
| 1 1/2 | tablespoons orange zest (the zest from one medium navel orange, approximately) |
| 5 | large eggs, at room temperature |
| 400 | milliliters heavy cream |
| 100 | grams slices of Terry’s chocolate orange, roughly chopped |
| 200 | grams high quality 70% dark chocolate, roughly chopped |
| 100 | grams hazelnuts, roasted and chopped, for garnish |
| 5 | to 10 segments Terry’s chocolate orange, for garnish |
| 400 | milliliters heavy cream |
| 100 | grams slices of Terry’s chocolate orange, roughly chopped |
| 200 | grams high quality 70% dark chocolate, roughly chopped |
| 100 | grams hazelnuts, roasted and chopped, for garnish |
| 5 | to 10 segments Terry’s chocolate orange, for garnish |
Written by: Chetna Makan
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14 Comments
My all time favorite cake to make and stand back and be proud is coconut layer cake. Just amazing. But I do enjoy making a chocolate layer cake with chocolate icing. It's cake for crying out loud - delicious!
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