attack of the orange and chocolate craving.

So i woke up saturday morning with a craving for some orange and chunks of chocolate concoctions, and after going through my food network magazine and wanting to make the orange and chocolate bread pudding... and consulting with mama callimanis- and her shooting down the idea (she's not the biggest fan of bread pudding- and i had to take her word for it since i have never had the stuff myself) i went on an googling extravaganza. I ended up with four tabs open on my browser when i declared times up for recipe searching (mainly because the office dvd i was watching had ended and i had to get up anyway to put on a new disk... but that's another post all together.) One was Ina Garten's mini orange and chocolate chunk cake- which satisfied my need for orange and chocolate chunks, but didn't include the nifty new (really old school) way of infusing orange into deserts when i came across a fellow bloggers orange and olive oil cake- which i would have loved to add chocolate into but the crumby texture that olive oil adds to cakes was not going to satisfy the craving. And a tasty kitchen recipe for double chocolate and orange cookies which would allow me to use my nifty new cookie dough scoop which i got for making truffles... but after some internal debate the mini orange and chocolate chunk cake won over... with a slight change to the original recipe- I used the old school way of boiling and orange for around an hour- then letting it cool in the water that it was cooked in and then pureeing it in the mini Cuisinart. The dough used about half the orange mixture, and tasted a little bitter, so i added a bit more sugar- Ina's original recipe called for a orange syrup to be poured over the cakes then a ganache. The cakes turned out delicious - slightly dense, but satisfied the orange and chocolate chunk craving wonderfully.
Now what to do with the left over pureed orange? After going through my yia-yia's joy of cooking book, it hit me- marmalade. its so surprisingly easy! soaking the pureed orange in the water it was cooked in for an hour, the boiling it for an hour. After the boiling the book recipe wanted around 4 cups of sugar- I cut it down to 3/4 of a cup to make it equal proportions of orange puree and water, it was a little runny when it was still hot, but thickened up quite nicely as it cooled. However when tasting it on toast this morning- a bit more sugar probably would have made it even better. But the good news in all of this- i've been bitten by the jam/jelly/marmalade bug! eek.