Too much time, too little to do...

Procrastination has never been a problem for me. But, BUT, I have never had a blog until recently, and blog writing has proven to be the chink in my procrastination armour. I cook all the time. Perhaps a little more than I really should, and yet when I sit down with my laptop I find it a real struggle to come up with a topic. This is very, very disturbing, given the fact that I used to take some pride in my writing and timeliness. My only suggestion to myself is to keep writing no matter how hard it seems. How original?
Since December I have been volunteering at a food bank. This Thursday we are having a party for all of the volunteers, and I was asked to bake a cake. I wanted something original, but easy to throw together, and then I remembered a marmalade pudding cake that I made from Nigella's new (kinda) book, Kitchen. 
I first made it back in November and it turned out kinda good. Great flavour, but the texture was off, and it was lacking a little something. The recipe calls to bake it in a 1x24cm square pyrex dish, which made the cake pretty slim and dense, as it did not rise at all when baking. You use quite a lot of marmalade and orange zest in the batter, and so the chewy, orangey strands didn't have anywhere to hide in the pyrex dish. It was all out there in the open, if that makes sense.
I knew with a little tweaking the recipe could be a classic. I remembered the flavour was great: very orangey, but nothing bitter or too intense. But the texture was just too dry and dense for my liking. So for my second journey with the recipe I decided to bake the batter in muffin trays. I got exactly what I wanted: the batter raised as it baked allowing a lighter, more sponge cakey finish. The zest and marmalade completely disappeared, so there was no chewy interruption.
Since I now had a cupcake in my hands, instead of pudding cake, I obviously had to come up with some icing. I'm not a big fan of cakes towered with super-sweet icing, so I decided to keep it simple, since the cake is really the star of this show.
I melted some fine quality bittersweet chocolate (added a little cream as needed) and poured it from a tablespoon over the top of the cooled cupcake, allowing the chocolate to run down the sides.
I'm pretty proud of this adaptation. With a few little tweaks the pudding cake becomes an entirely different dessert. If I didn't know any better I would never have guessed they were the exact same batter.
And so now I present to you the recipe for Terry's Chocolate Orange Cupcakes (or just cake), because this is exactly what they taste like:

250g soft unsalted butter
75 g white sugar
75g light brown sugar
150g marmalade
225g flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder 
4 eggs
zest and juice of 1 orange

Put all the ingredients into a food processor. Process until smooth and then pour into buttered, or lined, muffins trays (I believe I got about 12 muffins).
Put in oven at 350F, and bake for about 20 minutes. Toothpick should come out clean from middle of cakes.
Remove cakes from try and allow to cool .
Melt chocolate (semi or bittersweet) in a bowl over simmering water. Add cream as needed. Pour gently from a spoon over the tops of the cakes. It should run down the sides a little.

I'm going to bake this as a cake on Thursday, which I imagine will need about 40 minutes in the oven.
If you want to give the original recipe a try, bake at 350F for 40 minutes in a buttered pyrex dish. Cool in tray. Melt 75g and juice of half an orange in a small saucepan, and then paint the top of the cake for a glazed finish.

Enjoy!