FOOD COLUMN?

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Marble Cake?

A marble cake is a cake with a streaked or mottled appearance (like marble) achieved by very lightly blending light and dark batter. It can be a mixture of vanilla and chocolate cake, in which case it is mainly vanilla, with streaks of chocolate.

Nutrition Fact:

280 Calories

39g Carbohydrates

12g Fats

4g  Proteins

60mg Cholesterol

340mg Sodium

History:

According to Tori’s research, the idea of marbling two different coloured batters into a cake originated in nineteenth-century Germany. Typically, a mix of darker-colour ingredients were swirled into a yellow cake batter to create a marbling effect. Marble cake made its way to America with German immigrants before the Civil War. Originally the cakes were marbled with molasses and spices. The first recorded Jewish recipe for a marble cake appears in an American cookbook called Aunt Babette’s Cook Book: Foreign and Domestic Receipts for the Household, published in 1889 (you can still buy it, in an edition reprinted by Cornell University in 2009). 

Aunt Babette’s recipe replaced the molasses and spice marbling with chocolate marbling, a reflection of the new American obsession with chocolate. Chocolat became affordable to most people in 1895 when Milton S. Hershey.  In 1895 introduced the Hershey Bar, made with modern, mass-production techniques that cut the expense of production. 

Marble cake remained popular throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. After World War II, an influx of German-Jewish bakers spread awareness of marble cake and other German-style cakes and pastries. However, this style of baking began to wane in the 1970s and 1980s, as those bakers retired and Americans focused on other styles of baking, including French recipes from the growing ranks of classically-trained American culinary school graduates.

Recipes: Ingredients

• 1 ¼ cup cake flour
• ½ cup dry vanilla pudding mix about one 3.4 oz package—regular or instant
• 2 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp salt
• ½ cup 1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 ½ tsp almond extract
• ¾ cup milk
• 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• You will also need: 8- or 9-inch loaf pan three mixing bowls (large, medium, small), electric mixer, whisk

Method

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
• In a medium mixing bowl, sift together the cake flour, vanilla pudding mix (in dry powdered form), baking powder, and salt.
• In a larger mixing bowl, whip together the butter, sugar, eggs and almond extract for a few minutes till the mixture turns light yellow.
• Beat in half of the milk and half of the sifted flour mixture, then beat in the remaining milk and flour mixture.
• Whip until the batter is smooth and creamy.
• Rinse and dry the medium mixing bowl that you used for the sifted flour; you’ll need it again soon.
• In a small bowl, whisk together the cocoa powder and 1/3 cup of very hot water till smooth.
• Pour a little less than half of the cake batter into the medium mixing bowl that you rinsed out.
• Whisk in the cocoa powder mixture till fully combined and smooth.
• This is your chocolate marbling batter. Reserve the rest of the batter—this is your light cake marbling batter.
• Generously grease your loaf pan using butter or cooking spray.
• Pour the light and dark cake batters into your loaf pan and marble them. If you need a marbling technique, you can check out this post: How to Marble a Cake.
• Bake the marble cake at 350 degrees for 45-55 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.
• Remove from the oven and cool in the pan on a wire rack for 10-15 minutes.
• Gently remove the cake from the pan and let it cool completely on the rack.
• This cake will keep at room temperature for 3-4 days; wrap in plastic wrap or foil to seal in the moisture, or keep it inside an airtight container. To extend shelf life, keep the cake in the refrigerator.