Chocolate Marbled Cake

This is the sixth THB bake, chosen by Lena from Frozen wings.

With a group of gorgeous ladies, we are baking this cake for the event, The Home Bakers organised by Joyce, Kitchen Flavours. For this event, we are baking all recipes from one book, "Coffee Cakes" by Lou Seibert Pappas until every recipe has been baked from this book.

As mentioned at my first THB bake, I pledged to bake as much as I can like a retro-style home baker for all my THB bakes. Unfortunately, my wooden spoon have been thrown out due to its failure to mix too much butter on my second THB bake. - Ops! Nevertheless, I think that a classic marble cake itself can be quite a retro thing for me to bake... I know. I know. You must be thinking that I'm finding excuses because I don't seem to be not retro enough for this bake but I really think marble butter cake is always a classic cake to bake. Convince? - *wink* To console myself, I will make the marble swirl in this cake with a retro-looking knife... LOL!

As much as I like to bake and eat a classic marble cake, I'm actually quite sad to say... I have one hit and two misses for this bake. The hit for me is that I was actually feeling happy to see a nice looking cake freshly baked from the oven. Misses... (1) Despite that the cake looks good at its outside, I was disappointed to see the ugly swirl inside. I should have predicted this as I can tell that my cake batter was actually quite thick to create a good swirl inside the cake. Unfortunately, I assumed that I had created enough swirl and was sad that the cake had lesser swirls than what I expected. (2) This cake is moist and ok to eat but has a compact texture. I was disappointed that it is not fluffy like most traditional marble cake. Not really my kind of "retro" marble cake after-all...

I could have fix my no. 1 miss by baking the cake again, with more swirls inside the cake but didn't want to bake this cake anymore because we thought that this cake is just so-so for us.

After this bake, I'm actually quite disappointed with these two butter cakes that I have baked from this book. I was wondering if this is the kind of cake texture that Lou prefers or maybe I am expecting something too different from these cakes... To be positive, I shall not stop trying! And, hopefully, I can find other good recipes from this book and enjoy different cakes from different perspectives.

My disappointing marble cake

Making the cake batter

Making a marble swirl inside the cake

Happy and Sad seeing the cake

Being the rule of this event, only the host of the chosen bake can post the recipe in her blog post. Please visit Lena from Frozen wings for the recipe of this bake.

And, here are the notes and modifications that I made for my bake:

• Using 1/3 of the recipe, I've baked this cake in a 8 cm x 17 cm loaf pans at 160°C fan forced for 50 min.
• The chocolate that I'm using has 70% cocoa content.
• I didn't add instant coffee powder dissolved with hot water into my cake. I tried to substitute the missing amount hot water with a similar extra amount of sour cream. 
• I have replaced the baking soda with baking powder.

Happy Baking

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