♥ A recipe for Aunty Robbie ♥
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I recently came across this intriguing recipe in Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet.
It’s a self-marbling cake, made with extra virgin olive oil, cold eggs and a little white pepper, and it’s surprisingly good. The layers swirl together in a tie-dye fashion, giving the cake a lovely retro feel.
I baked it in a 10-cup bundt pan as instructed, but found that there was far more batter than needed. Despite making two extra muffins, the cake still burgeoned over the top of the pan, and I had to slice the bottom off to get it to sit flat. If you decide to bake this, make sure you have an extra loaf tin or muffin pan on standby to take the excess batter – it’s too good to waste!
Here's the bottom of the cake that I cut off - love the 70's swirls!
This recipe had me so fascinated that I went out and bought natural cocoa. I normally only keep Dutch-process cocoa in the pantry, but Ms Medrich was adamant that it wouldn’t work in this cake!
Chocolate mixture:
- 50g (½ cup) natural cocoa powder, sifted (I used Cadbury’s)
- 110g (½ cup) sugar
- 85ml (¹/3 cup) water
Cake batter:
- 450g (3 cups) plain (AP) flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon fine sea salt
- 440g (2 cups) sugar
- 250ml (1 cup) extra virgin olive oil
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (I used homemade)
- ½ teaspoon finely ground white pepper
- 5 cold large (59g) eggs
- 250ml (1 cup) cold milk
1. Preheat the oven to 175C (350F) or 160C (320F) with fan. Grease a 10 or 12 cup bundt tin, or two 6 cup loaf tins. Line the base of the loaf tins with parchment paper.
2.In a large bowl, whisk together the chocolate ingredients – cocoa (make sure you sift it first), water and 110g sugar. Whisk until well blended and smooth.
3. In another bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt.
4. In a large mixing bowl using an electric mixer with a whisk attachment, beat the 440g sugar, olive oil, vanilla and pepper until well blended. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition, and then beat for a few more minutes until the batter is thick and pale.
5. Beat in a cup of flour, then half a cup of milk, then the second cup of flour, then the rest of the milk, and finally the rest of the flour. After each addition, beat just enough to combine.
6. Using a cup measure, scoop 3 cups of the batter into the bowl with the chocolate mixture, and whisk or stir to combine.
7. Pour the two batters into the bundt pan (or loaf pans) in six alternating layers (three of each), starting with the plain batter. Don’t overfill the bundt pan. Any surplus mixture can ladled into muffin pans or a small loaf tin (reduce the baking time accordingly). The batter will swirl into the most gorgeous patterns as it bakes, there’s no need to do anything further to it.
8. Bake the cake until a skewer comes out clean, which should take 60 – 70 minutes. Ms Medrich recommends the same baking time for both the bundt pan or loaf tins, but so far I’ve only baked this cake in my Wilton Belle pan. Allow the cake to rest in the pan for 15 minutes before turning it out carefully onto a wire rack to finish cooling.
Suelle at Mainly Baking makes a very similar Alice Medrich recipe – she recently posted her mocha version here.
This cake keeps well, and is better eaten on the second day. It slices cleanly and presents beautifully, and has a gentle, old-fashioned feel to it, despite the olive oil and white pepper. Definitely one I’ll be baking again!
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 
Oh, stunning, I haven’t had a marbled cake of any sort for a long, long time. And that reminds me, I have my mothers Bundt or Kugelhopf tin, which really should be used! Lovely post, as always. Thank you.
Lizzy, it must be lovely to have a family heirloom like that! :)
Thank you for translating the recipe into grams and testing it out for us all. You are such a kind blogger, doing that for everyone. I have thought about doing recipes in cups, but whenever I weigh cups of flour I come out with hugely varying amounts so rather than write a recipe that doesn’t work for people I avoid the whole issue these days. I have that book too and am always sad that I can’t make the recipes in it. ! I always love Suelle’s marble cakes and I am fascinated by the idea that this does it by itself!! What a great cake! Clever!
Presumably the relative densities of the two batters are what makes it work. Only thing is, and maybe one of the chocolate minded bloggers in the UK knows the answer, is that our cocoa isn’t labelled as dutched or not dutched or whatever, so I don’t know which brands to go for.
I will be making this one for sure one day, just gorgeous, I always adore seeing your bundt tins in action. There is such a simple pleasure in reading happy cake posts. I love it :)
Joanna – I just use any of the common brands of cocoa on UK supermarket shelves- currently Tesco own brand. I can never work out if all UK cocoa is natural or dutched, but it works OK in this cake
Thanks for the mention Celia! You now know that there’s no talent to making this cake look good – it does it by itself! Yours look gorgeous – what a lovely shaped tin!
I’ve just checked while shopping, and Green and Black’s cocoa claims to be ‘dutched’ and lists potassium carbonate as an ingredient. Tesco and Cadbury’s say nothing on the pack and don’t list any added ingredients.
Suelle, there’s still talent, we’re just not swirling! :) I’m glad we’re making matching cakes!
Jo, I will write a post about the conversions I use – I usually scribble weight equivalents in my US cookbooks before I start. I always use a standard 150g flour to a cup – it seems to suit our Oz flour and always works in recipes. I know sometimes the US books will convert to much less than that, but then I end up with soggy batters!
I took a photo of the two cocoas for you – Dutch-processed on the left, and natural on the right. I’ve always been able to tell them apart by colour – if it’s dark and chocolatey looking, it’s DP, otherwise the natural is a light grey-brown. I’ve found the cheaper brands – Nestle, Cadbury – are natural, whereas the more expensive ones like Callebaut are DP. I just had a look at my Callebaut cocoa, and it states on the label, “High fat cocoa processed with alkali”.
I hope you try this cake, it’s great fun to make! :) xxx
Don’t write the conversion post for me specifically as I have lists and tables and so on and I simply don’t use them, very negative of me I know but I’m being truthful here. If someone like you has weighed out their cups and written the actual amounts down, made the cake etc then that’s what I rely on. I will pay more attention to the colour of cocoa from now on, that is useful to know. I had some very cheap cocoa one day which was much paler in colour so maybe that was what it was. xx
Looks delicious…and that bundt tin is gorgeous much cooler than my swirls!!!!
Thanks Achan! :)
Beautiful Celia ….and I WANT that tin!
Sally, I had a look for you, and Wilton actually have distributors in Dubai, so you might be able to track it down! Here’s a link to their website:
http://www.wilton.com/store/site/product.cfm?id=3E319171-475A-BAC0-55FBB4341B2AD714&killnav=1
This is one of my favourite cakes. I looked at the recipe today and thought about making it !!! spooky. Love yours it looks beautiful ( I love the pepper in it)
Thanks Tania! It was my first time making it, but I can see it will become one of my favourites too! :)
Oh so pretty! You just might persuade me to pull out my bundt pan too. The white pepper intriguing indeed!
Not exactly gluten or lactose free, Becca, but a delicious cake nonetheless! We took it to dinner with Pete’s aunts and uncles, and it was a big hit!
I’m more a Sloth Bun sort of person but I must admit that this looks good.
Thanks Cosmo, maybe I need to work on a sloth bun recipe, or a gorilla gateau? :)
Beautiful (looking) and fascinating (the ingredients) are the words which spring to my mind!
Thanks Claire! It really was interesting to be beating white pepper into a cake! :)
Celia, this is gorgeous! I’ve never made a marbled cake (well, I don’t make cakes that often), but I made a marbled bread and it simply didn’t work. It made me avoid marbled things from then on ;-)
I have one of those flower pans (that make six small cakes) – I imagine this marbled cake would be pretty nice in one of those, although the bundt format is much more impressive
great post, as usual…
Sally, last marble cake I made, Pete told me I’d “over-swirled”. He couldn’t say that this time, as there was no swirling involved! :)
What a lovely cake Celia!! I didn’t know you had such a collection of bundt tins. I’m going to make my very first bundt cake today in my 6 cupper. Its going to be a chocolate almond cake w/ ganache and sliced almonds on top. Wish me luck.
Mel, the chocolate cake sounds lovely! A collection of bundt tins indeed – Pete was whinging to his uncle yesterday that they don’t stack, so they need their own room for storage! ;-)
Absolutely gorgeous!
Abby, thank you! :)
very very sweet cake, perfect for a special cup of tea and a sit down.. and Hmm, maybe i shall invest in a cake tin like that! lovely celia.. c
Celi, I think you’d like this cake. It is gentle and comforting, yet gorgeously swirly and pretty at the same time. I saw the Wilton tins at Target recently at a very reasonable price – my friend Dan in California says she can buy them there and at Walmart!
My bundt cake tin collection is sadly lacking. I only have on pan that might qualify- but I really like the ingredients and look of this cake so I’ll use my “ifffy” pan and see what I can come up with.
Heidi, apparently it works well in loaf tins as well, which I’m going to try next time, as it would be good to have two cakes – one to keep and one to give away. I think it’s going to work in smaller formats as well!
I am shopping around for baking equipment. This cake is gorgeous, but I don’t expect anything but the best from you.
Norma, that’s very kind of you, thank you! Can’t wait until you buy your first bundt tin! :)
Self marbling sounds good to me and I love the flavors.
Greg, self-marbling makes it easy to impress, we just have to be careful not to blab about how simple it is! :)
Wow, it;s so pretty it’s almost mesmerising. I simply have to get myself a cake tin similar to that. I may buy one this weekend. Marble cake has been at the back of my mind for a while now.
FF, I hope you find a nice tin! I was thinking it would be lovely to make a jaffa cake version of this – might have to play around with the recipe!
Ooh Celia it looks delicious. I love how fun marble cakes are to cut into, it’s like a little surprise in each slice!
Thanks Claire! We played Rorschach inkblots with the slices – can you see a baby’s face in the middle of the slice in the top photo? ;-)
your marble cake is impressive celia..i just love its two tone waving musicality..and the ingredients are interesting and much better health wise too..
Thanks Jane! Best thing was we could use cousin Andrew’s olive oil! :)
It looks magnificent! It would be worth baking just to observe how it self-marbles!! Beautiful pics, Celia.
Thanks Chris, I think this is one your girls might enjoy making! :)
ROAR! That’s so pretty! I love that amazing swirly pattern. And now I have ABBA’s song Tiger in my head :P
Thanks Lorraine! Dolly and ABBA, are you dancing? :) Tiger cake is such an appropriate name, don’t you think?
Almost too pretty to eat!
Thanks Cindy! :)
What a lovely cake! I think your bundt pan has a very nice pattern, as well.
Thanks Manuela! I have a lot of bundt tins, but this one tends to be the one I’ll use most often. Its shape makes it easy to slice into even portions.
this intrigues me – I still have another cake recipe of yours to try and then I am going to do this one :)
Tandy, isn’t it an interesting recipe! I’m going to try it in two loaf tins next.
This looks beautiful uncut and stunning when cut. If Suelle doesn’t look out that Queen of Marbling title might be transferred ;-)
This was a very handy post as I was after your vanilla extract recipe and here is a handy link. After years of making my own vanilla sugar, I thought it was high time to start on the extract.
No, that will never happen, Suelle is the undisputed Queen of Marbling! :) This is a cheaty marble cake, but it certainly looks impressive!
Always made a big effort to buy and use Dutch now I am wondering if natural is better, surprised by the lightness of colour. Shall I be a devil and make one from the Dutch process to see if it fails. No one likes to go to the effort of baking and flunking but someone has to check the validity of that claim. Roz
Roz, the thinking is that the DP cocoa reacts with the baking powder – I’ve read this before in terms of bicarb as well. Generally I ignore it in cookies etc and always use DP, but as I said, Ms Medrich was adamant. ;-)
In terms of flavour, the natural cocoa produces quite a different cake – this one is less chocolatey than it would have been with DP cocoa, and as a result the chocolate and vanilla layers blended quite well together, flavour-wise.
I love your bundt pan! This sounds really yummy and it looks so pretty too.
Thanks Meg! It’s definitely been a good investment, as I’ve used it so often. Wish the same could be said of all the bundt tins I’ve bought.. ;-)
This is a very, very nice looking cake. I also like the self-marbling aspect – how magical!
Leaf, thanks for stopping by! The self-marbling really is almost magical! :)
What a beautiful looking cake Celia. Just perfect! But what an interesting recipe! I usually use room temperature eggs and have never added white pepper to a cake. I will have to try this. It looks fabulous!
Charlie, ditto, I usually use room temp eggs and have never added pepper to a cake either! I hope you like it!
I am impressed. First, it is a beautiful cake on the outside. And on the inside, wow, such beautiful patterns. I have made a marble cake once, and my patterns were not so flowing and lovely.
Thank you! I don’t do nearly as well when I have to marble the cake myself either! :)
I really don’t know how I missed this one Celia! It looks absolutely beautiful – I have admired the same cake on Suelle’s blog, and I am sorely tempted to give it a go – and sooner rather than later!!! I think all the cocoa powder I have ever seen must have been dutched, because it’s all the colour of the dark stuff you have pictured (thank you for that – it’s so helpful!) Perhaps I’ll have to see if I can get some really pale stuff – cheap cocoa here I come?!?
I love (and am insanely jealous ;-)) of your bundt tin collection!!!
C, I’ve just made this cake in two loaf tins, which might be a good option for you? That way you could keep one at home and give one away? :)
interesting about the Cocoa – I usually buy the Dutch at Chef’s Warehouse, but in emergency have found the Woolworth’s Home Brand Cocoa (packaged in Germany) a pretty good substitute. It is VERY dark and chocolatey – very cheap and much better than the usual Cocoa you get here in Australia.
Anne, this is really the only time I think the natural cocoa works well. I think the DP might overwhelm the plain cake otherwise…
I always wondered how these cakes were made when I saw them for sale! fantastic!
Thanks! Although I suspect most marble cakes are made more traditionally – with butter and a pointy stick to swirl the layers together! :)