Velvet Swirls: Espresso Marble Cake

While I was limited to just a toaster oven for baking, I stuck to small-scale projects. I recently got a copy of Thalia Ho's Wild Sweetness cookbook and decided to try her "Espresso Marble Cake," which is a loaf of vanilla batter and chocolate-espresso batter swirled together, topped with chocolate-espresso streusel.

First you make the streusel, by working cold butter into a mixture of flour, sugar, Dutch cocoa powder, espresso powder, and salt; and adding cacao nibs. You make the vanilla cake by creaming softened butter with sugar until light and fluffy; mixing in eggs, followed by vanilla; alternately adding the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt) and sour cream; and beating until aerated. You take a quarter of the vanilla batter and add in cocoa powder and espresso powder dissolved in hot water. Then you put alternating dollops of the vanilla batter and the chocolate-espresso batter into a parchment-lined loaf pan, marble the batters together; and top the batter with the streusel.

As directed by the recipe, I used a 8.5-inch by 4.5-inch loaf pan. The pan looked a little full, but I went ahead and put it in the toaster oven. The recipe says the cake should bake from 50-55 minutes, but my loaf took 70 minutes to bake. And it turned out it was too much batter for the pan. The parchment paper I used to line the pan extended above the rim, so it helped contain batter that otherwise would have overflowed. The cake rose so high in the middle that it came within a few millimeters of the top heating element in the toaster oven and the streusel was badly burned. 

 

Because the streusel was completely ruined, I cut the entire domed top off of the cake, creating what looked like a Pullman loaf, with a flat top. But what was left was beautiful; the batters were marbled together into delicate swirls. The cake had an extraordinarily plush, velvety texture. If I hadn't made the cake myself, I would have guessed that it was made through the reverse creaming method, which in my experience is much more likely to create this type of fine texture. And texture aside, the combination of vanilla and chocolate-espresso was delicious and satisfying. 

 

I liked the cake so much that I made it again a couple of days later, doing everything the same except that I used a 10-inch by 5-inch pan. This second cake is the one you can see in the photo above. It only took 55 minutes to bake and the streusel was still a little darker than I would have preferred; I should have tented the cake with foil partway through baking. But the bigger pan was definitely the way to go. Honestly, the streusel's not even necessary, but it was a nice addition. Big or small, with streusel or without -- this cake is just lovely.

 

Recipe: "Espresso Marble Cake" from Wild Sweetness by Thalia Ho.