Marmalade Cake with Orange Frosting

Recently, I had another birthday.  While I had grand plans for the cake I was going to make, these plans did not come to fruition, as I have been very busy with no time to do anything too fancy.

In the end, I decided to make a Marmalade Cake - inspired by the reference to "Marmalade Skies" in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds by The Beatles.

I wanted to make a different marmalade cake to any other that I had made before, so I hit Google for inspiration.  Importantly, the marmalade cake had to be frosted rather than glazed.  I came up with this recipe for Marmalade Cake, which interestingly was inspired by the Mitford novels.

 
Key changes that I made to the recipe were:  I included two tablespoons of marmalade in the cake batter; I also included two tablespoons of marmalade in the syrup.  I frosted my cake with an orange-flavoured buttercream rather than the sour cream frosting in the recipe, and I skipped the extra marmalade in the layers and on top of the cake.  I then decorated the top of the cake with orange M&Ms (but I slipped up in the yellowish night light and had a couple of pink ones in there).

I think the cake turned out pretty well:

It was quite sweet, but delicious all the same. I think a single layer would have been enough, as it was quite a lot of cake, even with a thin slice.

This was not the cake I had envisaged making, but it did the job.  I shared it with the people at my secondment workplace, and it must have tasted OK, because it disappeared.  That is a win in my books.