marble cake

by audrey roger

Now that autumn has settled in, it’s the perfect excuse to make comfort food and bake cakes. Not that you need an excuse. I often find marble cakes too dry and the chocolate mixture a bit bland. So I’ve adapted a few recipes to make one that is moist enough and has enough contrast between the vanilla and the chocolate mixtures. Using dark good quality chocolate is key. Cocoa powder will never have the same effect. As with the madeleines recipe, I use a silicone dish (for loaves) which makes it much easier to take the cake out and is very easy to clean.

preparation time: 5 min
total cooking time: 40-45 min

ingredients:
4 eggs
200 g sugar
215 g flour
225 g butter
90 g good quality cooking chocolate (try Green & Black’s or Meunier cooking chocolate)
1 tsp baking powder
1 Tbsp vanilla sugar (try Fiddes Payne vanilla sugar)

Preheat the oven at 180°C.

1. In a mixing bowl, whisk the eggs and sugar (not the vanilla sugar, leave that for later) together until you get a whitish texture.
2. Add the flour, which you will have previously mixed with the baking powder.
3. Melt the butter in a saucepan. Let it cool a bit then add to the rest of the mixture.
4. You can melt the butter in the same saucepan, once you’ve poured the butter out. Just add a bit of water.
5. Separate the mixture between two bowls. In one bowl, add the melted chocolate. In the other bowl, add the vanilla sugar.
6. Pour a bit of the vanilla mixture at the bottom of the loaf dish. Then pour over a bit of the chocolate mixture. Keep on alternating between the two until you finish pouring everything into the dish. The chocolate mixture will make swirls inside the cake.
7. Cook for about 40-45 minutes until cooked but still moist.
8. Let the cake cool down a bit before you slice it.