5-STAR REVIEWS: MARBLE CAKE

After a year of consistently baking blondies whenever I was feeling a bit of a sweet tooth, I have finally tried something new! Using BBC Good Food's delicious recipe, I have now made two perfect, mouth-watering batches of marble cake that I would love to share with all of your beautiful faces!

First thing is first – ingredients! To create the most beautiful and scrumptious cake, you will need...

– 225 g caster sugar                                                             – 2 mixing bowls
– 225 g butter                                                                       – 2 mixing spoons
– 4 eggs                                                                                – 1 baking tray
– 1 tsp vanilla essence                                                         – the end of a fork/a skewer
– 3 tbsp milk                                                                         – 1 big knife
– 225 g self raising flour
– 3 tbsp cocoa (or hot chocolate) powder

Preheat your oven to 160 °C if fan assisted, or 180 °C otherwise. Add the sugar and butter to one of the mixing bowls and fluff together until it reaches a creamy consistency. One by one, crack each egg into the mixture and stir in. Add the vanilla extract and milk, and then finally fold through the flour until a cake batter consistency has been formed! Easy peasy, right?

Now comes the marble part! Split the batter between the two mixing bowls as evenly as you can and mix in the cocoa/hot chocolate powder to one of the mixtures. I've used Whittard's Luxury Hot Chocolate to do this in both of my bakes but any cocoa powder will do! I really want to try Whittard's Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate to see how big of a difference it makes... I'll let you know how that works out! Once you have one yellow mixture and one brown, dollop each colour in a checkerboard fashion into a tray lined with baking paper. I definitely had more vanilla mixture than chocolate by mistake, hence the overload of yellow in the picture above. I managed to make two layers with the mixture that I had, dolloping vanilla on top of chocolate and vice versa. Once your double decker checkerboard is complete, use either a skewer or the end of a fork to create a 'marble' effect on top of the cake. Pop in the oven for 45 minutes and wait for heaven to appear...

And voila! You'll be left with a beautifully marbled cake that tastes just as incredible as it looks. Definitely my new favourite bake, without a shadow of a doubt! Have you ever made marble cake? Can you recommend any different flavours I should experiment with? Leave me a comment and let me know!