Marble Cake - Tea Time Wonders

As you may already know I love my tea time. It is a great excuse to indulge in lovely sweet things. One of those lovely sweet things that I love and that my mom has been making for me since I could chew is marble cake.

This light soft bundt style cake looks fantastic on the tea time table looks impressive with its lovely vanilla and chocolate swirls and is the perfect partner for your tea or coffee. What is even better is that it is very easy to make and very hard to get wrong.

You can actually have several different flavours of this as well, instead of cocoa powder for the darker colour you can use cinnamon, and instead of vanilla you can always flavour the light colour with rum, or banana or almond extract. I like a standard vanilla and chocolate marble cake and I love having a dolop of greek yogurt.

The flavouring and accompaniments are entirely up to you but for a standard marble cake you will need:

Ingredients:

4 eggs

1 cup of milk

2 tablespoons yogurt

½ cup of oil

3 cups flour

1 ½ cups of sugar

1 tsp of vanilla

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp bicarb

2 tablespoons cooking cocoa powder

Method

1. Preheat oven to 220C’
2. In a clean bowl whisk together the 4 eggs with the sugar until they turn very light yellow double in size and the sugar is pretty much dissolved
3. While still whisking slowly add the oil and then the milk and yogurt
4. Sift in the flour, baking soda and bicarb, and add the vanilla.
5. Grease either a loaf tin or a circular bundt cake tin and pour 2/4 of the cake batter into it
6. Add the 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder to the remaining batter and whisk in until fully incorporated.
7. Using a fork swivel in the cocoa batter into the tin. I tend to do figure of eights and just play around with it creating that lovely marble effect
8. Put in the oven at 220C for 10 minutes, then turn the oven down to 200 and bake for a further 45 minutes. Test with a wooden skewer and if it comes out clean the cake is ready.
9. Leave to cook in the tin before you take it out. You may need to run a knife around the edge to loosen it up.  

This is a great little cake, it is lovely for breakfast, it keeps very well for about 5 days. When it goes harder you can warm it up in the oven and cover it in nutella or tear it up in a cocktail glass rizzel with some booze, preferably some fruity liqueur, whip up some mascarpone with some double cream as if you are making a tiramisu maybe throw in some glace cherries. Hope this gives you plenty of ideas!

As you can see I didn't get the best marbeling effect with this one, but it was very yummy!

Bon Appetit!