Multi-Coloured Marble Cake

Green, Green, Green - Just as Ordered

Marble cakes take me back to my youth; it was a cake often favoured at events or parties. It’s been years since I’ve seen a marble cake, like so many things, cakes go in and out of fashion. Fortunately, however, my children know nothing of cake fashion, or any other fashion, really, for that matter.

I remember, once, Faran being greeted at school by twin American boys who had just come back from visiting Australia. We have Billabongs! they announced, putting out one leg with the label on it and indicating the name inscribed thereon between their hands. Faran, little chap that he was at 4 (mind you, he’s still pretty little), was vastly impressed. After school, he got in the car – Mum, they have Billabongs! he exclaimed. Never mind, said I, you have South African Billabongs. Really? he asked. Yes, I announced, definitively, see your shorts, the label at the back says A.C. Kerman – it’s South African Billabongs (Ackermans are a mass discount clothing store). Next day, bless his cotton socks, he jumped out the car, put one barefoot leg in front of the other, indicated a non-existent logo on the leg, and said to the twins, Hey, look! South African Billabongs. The twins were duly impressed. So was I.

I first ventured, at Conall’s behest, into cakes that were coloured. For his fourth birthday year he wanted a cake that was green, green, green, inside and out. (That particular cake was commissioned from a dear friend, Phillip, a professional chef, and was highly successful):

Since then, I have had to make pink cakes and green cakes – easy enough, given enough food colouring. Then, on the sporadic occasion, I have attempted to make multi-coloured, marbled cakes, using my usual recipes, but without much success. The secret, you see, once I had found a proper marble cake recipe in a book published in the 1970s (ulp! Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana – Groucho Marx), lies in a stiffer than usual mixture, courtesy of quite a bit of extra butter. With this recipe, you can happily plop out the mixtures, one after the other, a chocolate spoon on top or next to a white spoon, and, unlike thinner mixtures, each colour retains its essential shape and does not intermingle too much with the next so that when you cut the cake open – Voilà! One marble cake. 

Ever since I once awoke early and baked a cake for Fem, it has now become an entrenched family tradition, courtesy of Faran’s interventions. Just at the time that I thought, oh well, that was fun for a birthday or two, but getting up at 4am is, um, for the birds, Faran of course woke up on his 7th birthday, early, eager with anticipation, didn’t get up, kept on hearing noises in the kitchen, began imagining he could smell the lovely cake baking smells, wondered what surprise cake I’d made ... and promptly burst into great tears when I came rushing through into the bedroom to wake him up – sans cake. That weekend, we had to make it up to him and, ever since, woe betide a birthday (besides mine, of course – I chose to sleep in) wherein the birthday boy or girl is not awoken with hot cake, fresh from the oven. 

As a great treat, given it was Faran’s 8th birthday and a weekend and even a school holiday this year all rolled into one, the children had slept with me in “mum's bed" but as I got up with the alarm, so Conall awoke, and insisted on “helping” me make the cake in the kitchen:

Helping mum bake early in the morning

The great thing about hot cake is that you can treat it more like a dessert, and with this extra buttery cake, particularly given that my early morning self placed the single mixture into a tin made for double mixtures (what was I thinking? I wasn’t), I decided to go for broke and make a ganache (mixture of hot cream and chopped up chocolate) which I poured hot over the hot cake, pricking it with a fork all over to maximises the ganache sinking right in and the cake didn’t last until tea-time even. When I made this particular ganache, I didn’t have double-thick cream, but, since I was treating it as a dessert, that did not matter.

Marble Cake Recipe 

340 grams butter (3/4 of 500g block)

240 grams castor sugar (1 ¼ cup)

3 eggs

200 grams flour (2 cups)

1 Tablespoon baking powder

Pinch of salt

180 ml milk (3/4 cup)

1 teaspoon vanilla 

2 teaspoons cocoa

Mix together flour, baking powder and salt. In a jug, mix together milk and vanilla essence. Beat butter well, then add the castor sugar, beating again until creamy and white. Add eggs, waiting for each one to be fully incorporated before adding the next; the mixture should look fluffy and light. Alternately, add a few spoons of the flour mixture, then a few spoons of the milk mixture, thereby ensuring the mixture never becomes too wet or too dry at any one time. The final result will be a relatively stiff mixture, that softly plops out from a spoon, perfect for the marbling result intended. 

Take out half the mixture and place into in separate bowl, add cocoa to the remaining mixture, and mix well (I used about double the cocoa advocated for a deep, rich, dark chocolate effect). In a lined tin, place one spoon of the white and then a spoon of the dark mixture all around the bowl and then place the two mixtures one on top of the other, so as to create the marbled effect that is desired. Bake at 190 (Gas Mark 5 or 375 F) for 20 minutes then turn down to 180 (Gas Mark 4 or 350 F) for a further 40 minutes. 

For icing or frosting or ganache, especially poured hot over a hot cake, you can look no further than the Mars Bar or Bar One Ganache or an easier-to-make plain Chocolate ganache / icing / frosting

Delicious with hot coffee early in the morning.

One hot, sticky, delicious marble cake