Last night I decided to try out a recipe from the most recent Culinary SOS column in the Los Angeles Times. In the past, I've found this column (which appears each Wednesday in the Food section and prints recipes from restaurants and bakeries in response to requests from readers) to be a rich source of great recipes, including the strawberry scones from Clementine and some incredibly fudgy Recchiuti brownies. The June 11 column printed the recipe for marble cake from Buttercake Bakery.The first step in the recipe is to make a chocolate syrup of sugar, cocoa powder, light corn syrup, and water. The mixture is heated on the stove until just simmering, taken off the heat, and then vanilla is added. When I made the syrup it was thin, black, and glossy, roughly approximating motor oil.
The remainder of the recipe calls for making a vanilla cake batter with some chocolate chips. A third of the batter is poured into the bottom of a buttered and floured Bundt pan. Another third is mixed in with the syrup and then the resulting chocolate batter is poured on top of the bottom layer. Then the remaining vanilla batter is poured on top of that, and the mixture is marbled together before baking.
When I mixed the chocolate syrup with a third of the batter, I was pretty skeptical. The mixture was so thin, especially in comparison to the bottom and top layers of straight cake batter, that I thought it might turn out badly. After I baked, cooled, and cut the cake, I realized that the thin consistency of the chocolate layer is a critical feature of the cake -- it allows for fine, detailed swirls as a result of the marbling. I thought that the outside of the finished whole cake looked like some sort of crazy animal print, with the contrasting colors and the chocolate chip spots. But I was quite pleased with the end product and the lovely swirls in each slice. The cake was dense and moist, and the chocolate and vanilla flavors complimented each other beautifully.
Comments