CHOCOLATE ORANGE LOAF CAKE

Make sure all your ingredients (particularly the butter and eggs) are at room temperature before you start baking.
I used a baking spread for the cake and unsalted butter for the buttercream.For the best flavour, make sure to use a good quality orange extract and not an essence. If you can’t get hold of orange extract, you can use the zest of two oranges in the sponge. You can’t replace it with anything in the buttercream unfortunately, orange juice will Orange juice is not strong enough to get orange flavour in the buttercream, you would have to use a lot and it could make the buttercream sloppy. What I would suggest instead is mixing 100g melted chocolate orange into the buttercream, then adding 1 – 2 tbsp milk to loosen it if it’s too thick.
You will need a 2lb loaf tin for this recipe (you can test the size of your loaf tin by seeing how much water the tin can hold, 2lb will hold about 2 pints/1100ml of water). If you have a 1lb loaf tin, simply halve the ingredient amounts.
For easy lining of the tin, use a loaf cake tin liner*.