Superior Marble Cake

Not a test

The goal for this test was not to become acquainted or reacquainted with one of Grandma's recipes. I remembered this recipe well. In fact, Marble Cake and Red Velvet were the two cakes we made most often for large gatherings. I even remembered making this one myself when I was a teen. The problem was, I also remembered needing a scoop of ice cream or a glass of cold milk to wash it down. As my sister once pointed out, Marble Cake looked cool, but it was dry. 

This, then, wasn't so much a test as a revision. 

How I Fixed Marble Cake

The first thing I tried was replacing the shortening with butter. I wasn't sure if getting rid of the shortening would make the cake more moist, but I hoped it would at least make it more flavorful because that was another problem with this cake--it was a bit blah.   

The recipe said to sift together the dry ingredients (including the sugar) and then add the shortening, buttermilk, and eggs. 

I didn't do that. Instead, I started by adding the sugar and butter to a bowl and beating them well.  

Next, I added the vanilla and eggs to the butter and beat that mixture together.  

I stirred the flour, leavening, and salt together. Then I alternated adding the flour and the buttermilk to the creamed mixture. 

The resulting batter was smooth and quite thick. 

 I then set to work on making chocolate batter by melting the unsweetened chocolate in the microwave using 50% power. 

Stirring every thirty seconds, the melting process took about a minute and a half. I added the hot water, sugar, and baking soda. 

Stirring that together took a minute, almost like getting chocolate and cream to combine for a ganache. Once it came together, I added some of the vanilla batter and stirred until it was uniformly chocolate throughout. 

The next step was to spread the vanilla batter into a pan and drop the chocolate batter into separate blobs on top. Using a table knife, I swiped through the batter, first widthwise and then lengthwise to create the marble effect. You can see the effect in this picture of the frosted cake. 

It looked good, right? But how did it taste? 

Well, the flavor was better with butter, but I still found myself reaching for a glass of milk.  

Back to the drawing board. 

This time, I brought on friend Google for help. This tip from King Arthur sounded useful. It recommended replacing 1/4 cup of the butter in a cake recipe with oil. I found another tip on Sally's Baking blog, which recommended using cake flour. I didn't have cake flour on hand, so Pioneer Woman told me how to create something similar by replacing some of the flour with cornstarch.

I headed back into the kitchen to try again, using all the tips I'd found. I won't go through all the steps of making the cake because they remained basically the same. I will mention that I was more precise in my batter measurement the second time. I noted that the total amount of batter was 5 cups, so a quarter of that equaled 1 1/4 cups of batter for the chocolate mixture. 

I swirled the cake and this was what it looked like when it came out of the oven.

It was lighter to the touch and already looked less dense than the previous attempt. Once frosted and cut, the difference in texture and moistness was actually visible. Check it out in a side-by-side comparison. 

The Verdict

Marble Cake 2.0 was superior in every way to the first version, hence its new name: Superior Marble Cake. It was light, delicate, moist, and flavorful. The fact that it looks cool is just, well, icing on the cake. I happily called my sister to report success in my tweaking, and she may or may not be making this cake very soon. 

If you find yourself nostalgic for the old days when Marble Cake required a glass of milk to get it down, by all means make the recipe at the top of this post. As for me, I'll be making Superior Marble Cake from now on.