Four takes on Jaffa Cakes

Jaffa orange cakes

Four takes on Jaffa Cakes

by Great British Chefs23 August 2016

For the first week of 2016's Great British Bake Off, the plucky contestants will be whipping up a batch of homemade Jaffa Cakes. Take a look at four of our own recipes for the tangy treat and cook some for yourself.

Four takes on Jaffa Cakes

For the first week of 2016's Great British Bake Off, the plucky contestants will be whipping up a batch of homemade Jaffa Cakes. Take a look at four of our own recipes for the tangy treat and cook some for yourself.

Great British Chefs is a team of passionate food lovers dedicated to bringing you the latest food stories, news and reviews.

Great British Chefs is a team of passionate food lovers dedicated to bringing you the latest food stories, news and reviews as well as access to some of Britain’s greatest chefs. Our posts cover everything we are excited about from the latest openings and hottest food trends to brilliant new producers and exclusive chef interviews.

Great British Chefs is a team of passionate food lovers dedicated to bringing you the latest food stories, news and reviews.

Great British Chefs is a team of passionate food lovers dedicated to bringing you the latest food stories, news and reviews as well as access to some of Britain’s greatest chefs. Our posts cover everything we are excited about from the latest openings and hottest food trends to brilliant new producers and exclusive chef interviews.

If you’re anything like us, you’ll have most likely accidentally scoffed down the best part of a pack of Jaffa Cakes at some point in your life. The moreish, spongy, tangy treat is one of the bestselling cakes (or biscuits, depending on how you class them) in the UK, so much so that producer McVities created machinery that could make a whopping 2,000 of them every minute.

It might be because of this that Mary and Paul decided to kick off this year’s Bake Off by asking the contestants to make their own from scratch, taking the basic cake back to basics with a lovingly handmade batch of top quality Jaffas. But our chefs and bloggers are way ahead of them – take a look at their interpretations of the quintessentially British treat below.

1. The classic

With a sponge as light as clouds, an intensely fruity orange jelly and rich, indulgent dark chocolate on the top, Kate Doran keeps true to form and knocks the mass-made variety out of the water. Despite the three separate layers the recipe is actually quite simple, and the fact that they look like the packaged variety but taste so much better will score you major brownie points with the family.

2. The clever petit four

Want to dish out some chocolate orange treats at the end of a dinner party, but don’t think a blue and orange McVities box will cut it? Take a leaf out of two-Michelin-starred Marcus Wareing’s book and make some Jaffa Cake-inspired petit fours. Simple chocolate sponges are halved, hollowed and filled with Seville orange marmalade, before being stuck back together and sealed with melted chocolate. The orange peel garnish on top lends a simple yet effective cheffy touch.

3. The patisserie masterpiece

Do you see simplicity as the coward’s way out? Want to really test your skills and produce something so incredibly impressive dinner guests will fall to their knees in awe of your culinary prowess? Bryn Williams has you covered with a recipe for his signature Odette’s Jaffa cake. Homemade marmalade meets chocolate mousse, orange jelly, a sablé biscuit base and orange-flavoured cream to create an absolute showstopper of a dessert. It might take more than three hours to make, but the results are well worth it. After tasting this, shop-bought Jaffa Cakes become a bit of a disappointment.

4. The macaron marvel

Graham Hornigold lets a chef’s secret out of the bag with this macaron recipe – if you want to make chocolate orange sound posh, swap the citrus fruit for its much more refined and sophisticated cousin, mandarin. Of course, it also helps if you have the piping skills of a Michelin-starred pastry chef, but chef Graham holds our hand throughout the three-hour process as best he can in every step of the recipe. If you are in fact handy with a piping bag and create these beautiful, intensely flavoured macarons, they’d make an incredible gift for any avid baker – or you could just eat them by yourself, one after the other, in front of the latest episode of Bake Off.