If you’ve come here wanting to make a pretty marble cake, you are in the right place! Most marble cake recipes are modified pound cake recipes. They do need a LOT of butter. Whether you don’t want to use pound-cake level butter in your baking, or you are either out of butter or you just prefer to make it with oil- this easy marble cake recipe with oil is just for you.
I had a baking-craving. That was fuelled by my son’s accusations that it has been nearly 10 weeks of staying at home and we are hardly baking anything exciting. I have been dreaming of the perfect marble cake for a while, mottled streaks and all. There’s something so beautiful about a marble cake, a crowd-pleaser that satisfies both team vanilla and team chocolate. It is the best tea cake there is. Add to the happiness quotient of your day with a thick slice of this cake and your favourite kind of tea or coffee.
Some fun facts about Marble Cakes:
- Marble cake originated in Germany in the 19th century where it is called Marmorkuchen.
- Traditionally, the darker batter was obtained by addition of molasses, raisins or coffee as cocoa powder was available
- It was in 1889 that German Jewish bakers first used grated chocolate for the dark layer. It was the earliest chocolate marble cake. This recipe called for an easy-to-remember 1-2-3-4 – 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour and 4 eggs as the main ingredients.
We were looking to make this cake without butter as we did not have a lot of butter in stock. We adapted this marble cake recipe from here. The batter was a bit runny, and I have adjusted the recipe to correct that. That combined with the over-enthusiastic swirling in the pan by my son made the two colours merge a bit. But I guarantee that it tastes every bit delicious. I don’t see the slices lasting in the fridge for even a day.
Key points to remember while making a marble cake
- Don’t let the batter get too runny, especially if you want well-demarcated layers of vanilla and chocolate.
- Swirl gently to create some ripples but not too much.
- Some recipes ask to make two separate batters, one vanilla and other chocolate. I would ask you to avoid this double effort by reserving 1/3 or half the batter and mixing cocoa powder + milk to it.
- Add a little more flavour to the cake by adding orange zest or orange extract to the chocolate batter. This was my son’s idea 🙂
PIN THIS RECIPE TO TRY LATER!
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- 1.5 cups all purpose flour maida
- 1.5 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup sunflower oil or any neutral oil
- 1 cup sugar
- 4 Eggs
- 1.5 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/3 cup milk
- 2 tbsp cocoa powder
- 1-2 tbsp milk
Ingredients
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- We will start by preparing a baking tin. Take a loaf tin (either 9x5 inches or 8.5x4.5 inches) or a round baking tin (8 inches). Grease it with oil or butter. Use 1 tbsp flour (maida) to dust the pan thoroughly. If need be, cut a piece of parchment paper to fit the bottom of the pan and stick it over the greased surface.
- Preheat the oven at 180C.
- Into a large bowl, sieve the flour, baking powder and salt.
- In another bowl, mix the oil, sugar and eggs. Beat this with an electric handheld whisk for 3-4 minutes until pale yellow and fluffy. If you don’t have an electric whisk, then use a regular whisk, but spend some time aerating this mixture well.
- Add the vanilla and beat for another 30 seconds.
- We will add the flour in 3 batches to the wet ingredients.
- Add a third of the flour along with 1-2 tbsp milk and beat or whisk at a low speed until well combined. You can also use the cut and fold method to incorporate the flour into the mixture.
- Repeat with the next batch of flour with another tablespoon of milk and then the next unit all of the dry ingredients are incorporated into the wet ingredients with the help of 1/3 cup milk in all to get a silky smooth batter that falls in ribbons when poured with a ladle.
- Divide this batter into two bowls. One bowl is the vanilla batter. To prepare the chocolate batter, mix in cocoa powder in 1-2 tbsp of milk and mix this into the other bowl, stirring well with a spatula until well incorporated. Don’t over mix this.
- At this point, we have two batters and a prepared baking tin with the oven preheated.
- Pour ladle full of vanilla batter in the baking tin, followed by the chocolate batter and keep repeating until both batters are used up. Using a skewer, swirl the batter once right through to the bottom of the pan so that in places, both batters will intermingle to create nice marbled patterns.
- Keep this to bake in the preheated oven for around 45 minutes or until a skewer in the centre comes out clean.
- Allow to cool on counter for 10 minutes before unfolding. Cool on wire rack for an hour or so and then slice so as to get clean slices. You can also refrigerate overnight and then slice the cake.
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