Recipe: Marble cake

It was the end of a lazy Sunday afternoon when I felt the need of a cake (ok, I admit it is not so unusual for me).

Since I was undecided, I opted for two cakes in one! 🙂

I chose the marble cake, a great recipe from my book “On baking”. It is basically made of a vanilla-flavoured batter and a chocolate one, poured together in a mould to form a nice, bicolour, marbled pattern.

This recipe is great for breakfast, morning snack, tea time or any time you want it: it is very soft and spongy.

Compared to other cakes I’ve made, it is not so high in fats, but it does have a significant amount of sugar. The good thing, though, is that it is a perfect idea to use your leftover egg whites. The recipe only contains egg whites: no yolks, folks! 🙂

These traditional cakes are always hard to decorate so people just dust them with powdered sugar all over them. Of course it is a good, but if you want to give it a twist, just place some sticks (or your oven grill) on the cake before dusting. The trick is simple but the result is original and niiiiice! 😀

Marble cake

Print recipe

Ingredients

110g	Unsalted butter (room temperature)
240g	Granulated sugar
240g	Pastry flour
10g	Baking powder
4g	Salt
215g	Milk
1	Vanilla bean seeds
60g	Dark chocolate
1/2 teaspoon	Baking soda
1 teaspoon	Coffee extract (or Nescafé)
110g	Egg whites (around 3-4 eggs)

Directions

Place the soft, diced butter, the sugar and the vanilla in the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment

Cream the butter on medium speed for 15 minutes. Scrape the bowl often.

Sift the flour, baking powder and salt together twice

Incorporate gently the flour mixture and the milk alternately in three times into the creamed butter mixture

You should get a thick batter that is not too runny

Divide equally the batter in two bowls

Melt the chocolate with the baking soda and coffee extract

Incorporate the chocolate into one half of the batter. Always mix with an upward movement from the centre of the bowl to the sides, rotating the bowl every time to avoid deflating the batter.

Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks and incorporate half of them in the vanilla batter and half in the chocolate one

Brush your cake mould with melted butter and then cover it with flour (make sure you remove the excess flour)

Pour a first layer of vanilla batter into the mould

Add the chocolate batter

Then finally top everything with the remaining vanilla batter

If you want, you can pass the tip of a pointed knife through the cake to help achieve a nicer pattern in the final cake

Bake at 180° for 25-30 minutes (or until golden brown and until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean) then invert onto a wire rack and let cool down

Before serving, dust the cake with powdered sugar. I used randomly placed sticks on top of the cake to create an original pattern.

Note

The recipe provides quantities and baking times for a 18cm-20cm cake mould.
Bigger cakes should be baked at 170°C for more than 30 minutes.
If you notice that your cake is browning too fast in the oven, place a piece of aluminium foil over the mould and reduce the temperature to 165°-170°C and perform the toothpick test regularly