For the Love of Cooking - Marble Cake

It was a beautiful Saturday.

Hubby and I woke up in the morning, spent some time fooling around in the bed, then headed to Klang Wai Sek Kai for a Char Kuey Teow brunch. 

With a full stomach, we went to Jusco for some weekend shopping. Hubby bought 2 pairs of pants for me, some BB stuff for BB, and nothing for himself.

Then it’s nap time. Feeling fresh from my quick nap, since hubby still Zzzz, I decided to bake a cake – marble cake. 

Marble Cake

Ingredients:

Butter	115g
Sugar	200g
Salt (after reduced)	3g (1/2 tsp)
Flour	250g
Baking Powder	9g (2tsp)
Egg (A Size)	3
Milk Powder	75g
Water	160ml
Vanilla Essence/Extract	5ml (1tsp)
Cocoa Powder	35g

Methods:

1. Preheat oven to 180°C.
2. Dissolve cocoa powder in a little bit of hot water until well-dissolved into a mud like paste. This is an optional step, I usually do this to eliminate any lumps from the cocoa powder, and to make sure it dissolves well.
3. Dissolve milk powder in 160ml of warm water. Set aside to be used later.
4. Cream butter and sugar with electric mixer until pale yellow in colour and fluffy.
5. Add eggs to butter-sugar mixture, one by one, until roughly incorporated.
6. Sift flour and baking powder. Also, this is an optional step, to remove any lumps, loosen up the flour and to mix the baking powder with the flour.
7. Gently stir in 1/3 of the flour to the butter batter, alternate with 1/3 of the milk; continue for 3 rounds until you incorporate all the flour and milk into the batter.
8. Divide the smooth batter into 2 equal portions: 1/2 as vanilla batter, 1/2 as chocolate batter.
9. Add vanilla extract to the vanilla batter, and the dissolved cocoa powder to the chocolate batter.
10. Intersperse globs of vanilla batter with chocolate batter into the baking pan.
11. For the marble effect, use a spatula or chopstick, twirl the batter together in a few figure-eight motions. Do not over stir, or you will get a well-mixed light chocolate batter.
12. Bake in oven at 180°C, for 35-45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Voila! In less than an hour time, we got to enjoy a moist marble cake with a strong chocolate flavour!

T had a bite. Oops...It's a bit too salty

I give myself 70% for the cake. The taste of the cake was fine, but I could have used a bit less salt. I think I should reduce the amount of salt from 9g to just 3g next time, as I was using salted Planta margarine instead of unsalted butter required in the original recipe.

I like free and easy Saturday like this one…Happy Saturday = happy family day!