Wish You A Very Happy New Year !!!

I love orange and lime flavor in cakes, muffins and pies. When I first saw this cake on fat freevegan, I instantly liked the idea of chocolate and orange. I bookmarked this recipe and decided to do it for new year eve. To make it fat free Susan used soy yogurt instead of oil; non vegans can use low fat dairy yogurt  instead of oil; I used oil this time. This cake is not very sweet but by using icing it had enough sweet and its not light and fluffy but is dense since it uses whole wheat flour.

The toughest part for this cake was decoration. I don’t like the icing with lots of butter or shortening, so I avoided them and made decoration with fruits. I wanted to decorate the cake with oranges, it was a tough challenge to cut the orange to represent numbers but my friend Rudra helped me to get this done.

Ingredients:

1. Unbleached flour – 1 ½ cups
2. White whole wheat flour – 1 ½ cups ( Can use unbleached flour too)
   
3. Sugar – 1 ½ cups
4. Cocoa – ½ Cup
5. Baking soda – 2 tsp
6. Oil- 3/4 Cup
7. Orange or Vanilla Essence – 1 tsp
8. Fresh orange juice – ½ cup
9. Grated orange peel – 2 tbsp
10. Vinegar – 2 tablespoons
11. Water – 1 ½ cups

Chocolate Icing:

1. Powdered sugar – ½ cup
2. Cocoa – 1 tbsp
3. Orange juice – 2 tsp
4. Vanilla extract (or 1/8 tsp. if double strength) – ¼ tsp
   
5. Extra orange juice as needed
6. Orange slices for decoration

Happy New Year 2013

Method:

• Preheat oven to 350F
• Spray pan with oil  and dust it with little cocoa powder
• Mix all the dry ingredients ( Flour, whole wheat flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda) in a bowl.
• Mix all the wet ingredients ( Oil, essence, juice, orange peel, vinegar, water) in another large bowl.
• Combine dry ingredients into wet ingredients very slowly, stir them enough to mix well. Don’t over beat.
• Pour batter into greased and dusted pan, bake it for around 30 to 50 minutes ( depends on the pan used and oven) or until a inserted toothpick come out  clean.
• Cool it , invert and drizzle chocolate icing.
• For chocolate icing mix the ingredients in separate bowl. Little at a time, stir in enough extra orange juice to make a drizzling consistency. Drizzle the chocolate icing over the cake, wait for few minutes for it to set and decorate it with orange slices.

Notes:

• I used 9 X 7 X 2.5 Pyrex glass pan and it took 50 minutes to cook , original recipe used bundt cake pan and instructed bake time is 30 to 40 minutes.
• Check  orange juice sweetness, if its sour and not sweet, increase sugar quantity to 1¾ Cup.