I don't know why, but I just felt like baking a cake today. Initially I wasn't going to bake a cake since I was already exhausted from work...but mangaged to bake this delicious cake. I used a recipe from the Australian Gourmet Traveller cookbook series. The book was dedicated to chocolate recipes. Most of the recipes had to use an ingredient called dutch process cocoa, but I had none of that so I just skipped those recipes. Instead I chose a recipe called "Chocolate and orange marble cake". However I had to substitute the ingredients since I didn't have any oranges since they were all used up in Qing Ming. Hence my "walnut marble cake"!
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walnut marble cake
adapted from Australian Gourmet Traveller - Chocolate (recipe book)
recipe adapted was "Chocolate and orange marble cake"
later edited by me
ingredients:
serves 8-10 (that's what the book said)
I made a 20 x 20 cm square cake
I got 9 pieces of cake
- 150 grams margarine, softened
(I don't use margarine from the fridge, but I beat it up with the mixer to make it soft) - 200 grams caster sugar
- 1 1/2 tsp vanilla essence
- 2 eggs
- 300 grams self-raising flour, sifted
- 3/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp bicabonate soda
- 1/2 tsp cream of tartar
- 1/2 cup milk + 2 Tb extra
- 100 grams cooking dark chocolate, melted
(the original used 80 grams dark chocolate, I used 80 grams of dark chocolate and 20 grams of milk chocolate. I don't think it makes a difference.) - handful of unsalted walnuts, broken up (optional)
fan forced
method:
- Cream the margarine and sugar in a electric mixer until it turns pale yellow.
- Add beaten eggs and vanilla essence gradually and mix until combined after each addition.
- Sift flour, baking powder, bicarbonate soda and cream of tartar together.
- Fold in flour and 1/2 cup of milk alternately with a plastic spatula.
- Divide mixture into two portions.
- Stir in melted chocolate to one portion.
- Stir in the extra 2 Tb of milk to the other portion. - Lightly grease a baking tin with oil. Line the tin with grease-proof paper and lightly grease the paper.
- Spoon heaped spoonfuls of mixture into the tin. (I did random blobs of vanilla and chocolate.)
- Smooth the surface with the spatula. Sprinkle crushed walnuts on top if desired.
- Bake for 40 minutes or until cake comes out clean when poked with a skewer.
You can see my cake has lots of holes because I poked it too much.
Heehee~ the pretty pattern. Looks more like stripes to me though. Hrmm, I thought this cake would fail because I suck at making marble cake. I tried a few months back and it was horrible, but wanted to self-improve at the failed recipes. I also thought I put too much raising agents which will make the cake sink and I thought I mixed the chocolate mixture too much. ><
I'm really glad it turned out all right and so delicious tasting!!! ^_____^
