Marble Cake and a lesson in cake making!

Sometimes you just can’t beat the old favourites – Marble Cake is exactly that, it’s not complicated or difficult just delicious!

Ingredients:
200g butter
200g caster sugar
150g self raising flour
50g plain flour
4 eggs
3 tbsp cocoa powder

Preheat the oven to 180c/160cFan/350F/Gas Mark 4

Grease and line an 8″ round cake tin.

Cream together the butter and sugar

I thought I’d use this post to give you the low down on fail safe cake making.

The idea of creaming the butter and sugar is to start off getting some light airy fairyness into your cake and forms the base of most sponge cakes. However it is not just a case of mixing the two together. They best implement for the job is an electric mixer, not only does it save your arms from aching it helps incorporate air very quickly.

This is butter and sugar in a what you may think is creamed state

However, if you carry on mixing the butter and sugar will go very pale and fluffy like this…

This is exactly how you want it, plenty of air incorporated for super fluffy yummy sponge and much paler than before.

Okay so over with the lecture let’s carry on with the recipe.

Beat the eggs together well (another important step – Mrs Beeton says ‘one egg beaten well is worth two not beaten’ and she’s right – wizzle up those eggs well with a fork).

Next step is to add the eggs to the creamed butter and sugar but don’t add them all at once, little by little is how to play the game. When you have added about half the eggs add a spoonful of your flour. This will stop the mixture from curdling. Once a cake mix has curdled it is very difficult to pull it back, a good beat will sort out the texture but the mixture will not be very stable and can give varied results when you bake it.

Continue adding the egg little by little followed by a spoonful of flour.

Once all the eggs are combined with the butter add the remaining flour to the mixture and mix. Mix till combined but don’t beat it hell for leather or the cake will be tough and have a poor texture.

Okay dokey so now we have a lovely cake mixture. Separate your cake mix into two halves each in a bowl of their own.

To one bowl add the cocoa powder and mix well.

Now you have a chocolate cake mix and a plain cake mix. Spoon large dollops of each type of cake mix into the tin like so

Keep adding cake mix in large dollops randomly.

Once all the mix is in the tin smooth the surface with the back of a spoon.

To create the marble swirl effect insert a table knife into the mixture in an upright fashion. Swirl it around the tin in a decreasing circular motion. You won’t need to go mad, just enough to create the swirly marbly effect.