My Mother's Marble Chocolate and Vanilla Ring Cake Recipe
Perhaps, you know the old adage, which actually goes back to Tudor times, ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it (too)?’ Well, with this recipe – you can! All your baking dilemmas, should I go for a chocolate cake this time, or for a vanilla one, are solved with this one recipe – you can have both in one cake!
This chocolate and vanilla sponge cake is a classic childhood sweet treat. It is moist with a soft and fluffy texture, it looks pretty, and is still elegant, since the light and dark batter is blended lightly together giving it a marble appearance, and so, hence its name, marble cake, or it is sometimes called a zebra cake, due to its zebra-striped pattern (skunks are also striped, but I supposed that isn’t a very appealing name for a cake). It is also known as a ring cake or a Bundt cake, especially in the United States.
So, this cake delivers on appearance and flavour every single time, and if you want to impress your family and friends, this is the cake to go for. It is very easy to make and you can whizz it up in no time.
It originated in Germany, where it is still very popular, from a Kugelhopf, a two-coloured sweet yeast bread.
This impressive cake has been frequently baked in Austrian households and other European countries, including in Slovenia (Šarkelj) where it represents one of the most frequently baked weekend sweet treats and it is enjoyed for breakfast as well, there is no wrong time to eat it!
This was a regular bake in my house when I was a small girl, all you need is a few simple ingredients and a few simple steps to follow, I promise you, you will think twice before reaching out for the store-bought version, and here it is, my mother's recipe.
Recipe
Ingredients
4 medium eggs, room temperature
250g caster sugar
1 Tsp vanilla extract
100ml milk, room temperature
100ml sunflower oil, room temperature
250g all purpose white flour (plain flour), sifted
16g baking powder
2 Tbsp cocoa powder, sifted
dusting sugar/vanilla powder sugar for dusting, optional
Method
Preheat the oven to 180°C static or equivalent.
Grease well with butter or oil a ring mould or a bundt cake tin. Make sure you cover every nook and cranny (alternatively you can use a 20cm cake tin or a 900g loaf tin, grease and line with baking parchment)
Dust with flour, shake off and tip out the excess.
Put in the mixing bowl the eggs and the sugar, and beat well until the mixture becomes golden pale in colour.
Add the milk, oil and vanilla extract, mix well.
Start adding, one spoonful at the time of sifted flour together with the baking powder.
Divide the batter, spoon half of the batter in a separate bowl.
Add in one half of the batter sifted cocoa and mix well.
Pour the white mixture into the base of the prepared ring mould first. Then pour the chocolate mixture on top.
Gently swirl a little with the knife.
Bake for about 35 minutes or until the cake has shrunk from the sides of the tin and is well risen, the top of the cake should ‘spring back’ when lightly pressed with your fingertips.
Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes.
Turn out the cake and finish cooling on a wire rack.
Dust with icing sugar or vanilla icing sugar and serve.
