Excuses Excuses

Excuses aren't strictly necessary for cake (eating it or baking it, in my opinion).  Nevertheless, I had one for my mocha almond marble cake: I ran out of ice cream.  If we're fairly like-minded (and if you're bothering to read this, we probably are), you may be nodding in agreement and thinking 'Ah yes, a dire situation'.  Alternatively, you may be thinking that this is the least sensible reasoning you've encountered this week (in which case I'd say you're having a good week!).  In the event that you're thinking the latter, never fear, I have an excuse for my excuse: to obtain more ice cream I would have had to get dressed and go to the store, whereas to obtain cake, I only had to bake it.  No need to get out of my pyjamas.  (I should note that I am taking for granted two things here: 1., that pyjamas aren't clothes, even in the grocery store, and 2., that any evening spent at home requires dessert.  I hope that you'll agree with at least one of these two statements*).

I've reached a point in my life where, small as my cupboard is, it almost always contains all of the ingredients necessary to make some form of cake, cookies or brownies; good for my evening dessert requirement, not so great for my arteries.  But you can't have your cake and eat it too!...  Anyway.  I had a look through Everyday Easy Cakes & Cupcakes to see if anything for which I had all of the ingredients struck me, and I found a marble cake (p. 55).  It looked good, sounded easy, but since I hadn't actually used a recipe from this book before I thought I'd compare it to recipes from Martha Stewart and Joy of Baking.  Joy of Baking called for melted chocolate rather than cocoa powder as in the other two recipes, but since it was outnumbered and I had more cocoa powder than solid chocolate it was vetoed on that count.  Bake temps were the same across the board (350F), but Everyday Easy Cakes made me a bit uneasy with its hour-long bake time, as opposed to 35 minutes on the low-end of Joy of Baking and 50 minutes on the top end of Martha's recipe.  Ultimately I opted to use Martha's recipe as my basis (again), but I made some changes, beginning with one that might seriously cause you to question my excuse for this cake, if you haven't already.

Joy of Baking made the suggestion to add a tablespoon of brewed coffee to the chocolate portion of the batter to enhance the chocolate flavour.  When I read that, I remembered a trick from my days as a cake decorator: the baker would add espresso to one of the cakes (I think it was the flourless chocolate cake) to bring out the chocolate that much more.  Thus I got it in my head that I wanted to add not coffee, but espresso.  Of course, I don't own an espresso machine (much to my constant chagrin), so if I wanted to move forward with my caffeinated plans it was going to have to wait until the next day when I could get the espresso from town.  So much for my evening dessert.  The decaf tea that I settled for instead was a poor substitute, but I think the cake was worth the wait.

I only needed a tablespoon of espresso, but I got a double shot because, why not?  I might have needed the extra jolt for caking!

Martha's recipe calls for baking in a 9"x5" loaf tin, but I have an 11" tube pan, so it was necessary to double the recipe (what a shame).  Unfortunately, doubling the recipe meant that I was unexpectedly a bit short on caster sugar.  I made up the difference with about a 1/4 cup of light brown sugar, and if it made any difference at all I would suggest that it was a positive one; I tasted a bit of the batter pre-flavouring with extract and it was tasty.  How much of that should be attributed to flavour added from the light brown sugar as opposed to flavour from the buttermilk I'm not sure, but it may be worth experimenting.  I combined the two sugars well, breaking up the clumps formed by the light brown sugar as much as possible, before beating them into the butter.

I think the somewhat sticky light brown sugar did prevent the butter and sugar mixture from attaining a truly fluffy consistency, but I don't think it ultimately affected the consistency of the cake itself, and it all looked normal when I beat in the eggs.  I refrained from adding the vanilla extract at this stage because I wanted it only in the chocolate half of the batter; the other half was to be almond.  I didn't have buttermilk on hand, I never do, I just make it by adding white vinegar to milk in a 1 tablespoon to 1 cup ratio (that is, 1 tablespoon vinegar to 1 cup milk) and letting it sit for a couple minutes.  While that was sitting I combined the flour, baking powder and salt.  I chose to use plain flour rather than cake flour as Martha recommends because I wanted a denser cake.  Then I mixed half of that into the butter and sugar, then beat in the buttermilk, and finished off with the second half of the flour, baking powder and salt mix.  Next I split the batter in half.  I wanted half and half, rather than the slightly-more-vanilla-slightly-less-chocolate suggested by the recipes.

I added the extracts to the respective halves, vanilla going to the batch that was to be chocolate, and almond going to the other.  I was eager to try an almond extract that I had recently purchased because of its label and place of manufacture, and almond swirled with espresso and chocolate sounded mouthwatering to me...

Since adding the extracts after the split meant an additional mixing step I was careful to incorporate them without over-beating; I would certainly still eat a flat cake, but it was preferable that it rise.  As it turns out my fears were probably groundless, as I wound up having to mix the chocolate batch significantly more than the almond one.  When it came to the cocoa powder, Martha said to mix a 1/4 cup into 2 tablespoons boiling water.  The idea is to create a paste that will be easily mixed into the batter and prevent the formation of lumps of cocoa powder; the same technique is used for making red velvet cake, except in that case you substitute red dye for the water.  I was doubling the recipe, so I mixed a 1/2 cup cocoa powder into 3 tablespoons boiling water plus my 1 tablespoon of espresso.  This was all well and good, except the resultant paste was far too thick.  I knew this, I knew that I should add more water, and yet I opted to ignore my instincts and plopped the mass into the batter.  Mistake.  Unsurprisingly, I ended up with lumps of paste rather than lumps of powder.  I broke up as many of these as I could on the sides of my bowl with my spoon, and in the end it wasn't too bad, but I did have to mix far more than I would have liked to, and the chocolate batter was significantly looser than its almond counterpart.  Thankfully it rose anyway, just as well as the almond.

To get the marble effect, you have to spoon the two batters in a checkerboard pattern:

And then swirl (I used an offset spatula, but a knife would also work):

And it all rose!

And I really enjoyed it, both with a splash of brandy for dessert that night, and with a cup of coffee for breakfast in the morning.

* Ok, I admit it, I've gone to the grocery store in my pyjamas.  And yes, I've done so on more than one occasion.