Elizabeth Polding shares a receipe for marble cake. It’s the closest thing we could think of that was tortoise related!
Adapted from the BBC Good Food recipe.
Marble cake is a variation on madiera cake, which is an absolute favourite for birthday cakes (ok, not favourite, second to Colin the Caterpillar cake, which is always going to be first choice). It also makes quite a good base for the kind of cake that could be iced and decorated. I’m not huge on decoration; the occasional marzipan fruit perhaps and I put flowers and leaves on my pies, plus the initial of whoever the pie is for to avoid the perils of a two veggie, two carnivore household! However, sponge and madeira cake do lend themselves well to being covered in fondant in lurid colours. The variation on the original recipe is the inclusion of light muscovado sugar instead of caster sugar. It gives a slightly squidgier texture, which I prefer.
The cake is, to quote a football pundit (any football pundit, really), a game of two halves. Essentially, you make a basic cake mix, divide it into two, make one chocolate and one vanilla, swirl them back together so you get a pattern, but not a complete assimilation and there it is!
Ingredients:
- 225g unsalted butter
- 225g light muscovado sugar
- 4 eggs
- 225g self raising flour
- 3 tablespoons of milk
- 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
- 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder (Green & Blacks is lovely, but doesn’t give discernably better results than Tesco’s own. I’ve tried)
Method:
If you want this to be round, use a 20cm cake tin, grease one or line it with baking parchment. On the other hand, a standard bread tin works fine; again either grease or line with baking parchment. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees (fan oven).
If you have a food processor or stand mixer, chuck in everything except the cocoa powder and mix it until everything is incorporated. If doing it by hand, cream the butter and sugar, beat the eggs and add them a bit at a time, mixing as you go. Fold in the flour a bit at a time (use a metal spoon and treat it gently. There is air in the mix and you want to keep at least some of it). Mix the milk and vanilla and add that to your mix. You should end up with a batter in either case.
Divide your mixture equally between two bowls. Add the cocoa powder (preferably using a sieve so that you don’t get lumps) to one of the bowls. You will end up with one bowl of vanilla and one of chocolate.
Now for the artistic bit. How you marble your cake is a very personal thing, but what I tend to do is tip half of each bowl into a separate part of your cake tin so that you end up with four different coloured blobs of mixture next to each other. I then use the handle end of a wooden spoon and give it a bit of a swirl, so that it mixes a bit into a swirly pattern, but with two distinct colours. You can also add the mixture a tablespoon at a time, alternating colours, but that will obviously take a bit longer.
Bake for 45 – 50 minutes. About half way through that time, you might want to cover it over with foil if it is looking a bit brown on top. Check with a skewer after about 45 minutes; stick it into the middle of the cake. If it comes out clean, it’s done. And there it is! If you are going to decorate it so that it looks like a tortoise, by all means do so, but make sure it is absolutely cool first, otherwise the icing will melt.
Icing!
In terms of how you might go about icing an amazing tortoise cake, I would suggest googling ‘Tortoise Cake Tutorial’ where you can learn how to make a tortoise cake, accompanied by a Scott Joplin piano piece. What’s not to love?
