Orange Cake with Vanilla Orange Butter Filling

Ingredients

For Cake	For Filling and Frosting
140 gm butter	25 gm butter
140 gm caster sugar	2 tspn vanilla extract
140 gm self raising flour	175 gm icing sugar
1 tspn baking powder
2 eggs	juice from ½ large orange
1 heaped tbspn ground almonds
2 tspn vanilla extract	flaked almonds for topping as required
zest from 1 large orange
juice from ½ large orange

Preparation

Preheat the oven to 170° C.
Line an approx 23 cm long rectangular cake tin with baking paper.
Zest the orange and reserve.
Juice the orange.
Cake
Soften the 140 gm of butter and add a pinch of salt (or use lightly salted butter).
Sift the flour and baking powder into a mixing bowl and add the softened butter.
Add the caster sugar, orange zest, half of the orange juice, ground almonds, eggs, vanilla extract and mix until smooth and creamy.
Spoon the cake mixture into the lined cake tin.
Filling and Frosting
Whilst the cake is baking make the filling.
Soften the 25 gm of butter.
Mix the butter, vanilla extract and icing sugar with just enough orange juice until smooth and just spreadable.

Cooking

Bake the cake in the oven for 40 min.
Check that a skewer comes out clean when pushed into the middle of the cake, and if not, continue to bake for another 5 min or so.
When cooked, remove the cake from the oven and allow it to cool to room temperature.
When cooled, carefully slice the cake in half and spread the filling over the bottom half, but reserve some filling for the top of the cake.
Replace the top of the cake and spread with the remaining filling mixture.
Sprinkle the flaked almonds over the top of the cake.

Notes

It is worth mentioning that not all vanilla extract is the same strength, and the 2 tspns used here are what is required from the typical small glass bottles found in every supermarket.
The recipe was adapted from one published in "BBC GoodFood" journal.