Marble Velvet Cake

This week is free choice week with the heavenly cake bakers, and once again, I let my husband choose the cake. It’s a bit of a cop-out on my part, to be honest, because I just don’t like making decisions. I point him at the list of cakes and tell him to pick something that has a link on the left hand side, but no link next to it. This week, he picked the Marble Velvet Cake, which is one of the cakes Marie made before the rest of the group joined up. I also made the quail egg indulgence cake, only with chicken eggs… but it wasn’t very photogenic, and I don’t really have a lot to say about it. To me, it was just a basic pound cake, maybe a little more rich/moist, but otherwise nothing special.

The marble velvet cake starts with a sour cream/egg yolk butter cake base. The method’s the same as most of Rose’s other butter cakes. Start by gathering ingredients, then mix up the dry ingredients and add the butter and most of the sour cream. The rest of the sour cream gets mixed with the egg (yolks) and vanilla. Have some melted chocolate standing by.

Cream the butter and sour cream into the dry ingredients, and beat for a minute and a half to “strengthen the structure”. Gradually add the egg mixture, beating in between.

Once it’s all in and mixed, take about 1/3 of the batter out and mix with the (cooled) melted chocolate. Layer the batter in the pan, as vanilla, chocolate, vanilla, chocolate, vanilla.

Use a spoon to make waves in the batter, marbling it.

After it bakes and cools, drizzle with a chocolate glaze, then dig in. 🙂 We had a few friends over for drinks and card games last night, and more than half the cake disappeared. Everyone seemed to enjoy it. The crust had a satisfying crunch to it. I think this was partly because of how fresh it was — I had only finished baking it about 2 hours before everyone got here.

This is what the inside of the leftover cake looked like this morning.

I think I need to work on my marbling skills, but the flavour and texture was fantastic, so I’ll be happy to practice with this one.