On Sunday, I decided to test out my second recipe from Mel Johnson’s fabulous book “Bundt”. This had been one of the three choices I was going to bake for the first one but the Snickerdoodle Bundt won the most votes in the polls across my social media. I had also asked if people could guess what I was going to make next. The other choice was for a Black Forest Bundt. More people thought I was going for the Black Forest one but sadly this wasn’t the choice this time!

The Vanilla and Chocolate Marble Bundt is a classic flavour and design and one I have made variations of over the years. I was really looking forward to testing out another version and taking it to work to see what my work colleagues thought of it.

The actual cake batter has cocoa powder in it to get the chocolate flavour but the icing contains real, melted dark chocolate. My mouth was watering at the thought of making this.

First of all, I had to grease the pan. This time, as the recipe is chocolate based, the cake could be greased with melted butter and then dusted with cocoa powder. Once again I did my best to ensure it was greased into all the nooks and crannies of the pan so that the cake would come out of the pan easily.

To prepare the chocolate part of the Marble Bundt, I had to put boiling water on some cocoa powder and mix it into a smooth paste. As I was to find out later, don’t do this when you get a text message. This meant I wasn’t concentrating and added a third more boiling water to the cocoa powder. Hence this made more liquid and the chocolate part of the cake was runnier!

The next job was to cream butter and sugar together in a large mixing bowl. Then to add eggs, one by one and beat them into the mixture. This was followed by some vanilla extract and then some plain flour and baking powder.

The next job was to separate the mixture into two bowls and to add the cocoa powder paste to one of the bowls. This was when I realised my mistake! Although I had carefully halved the mixture, the chocolate half was much runnier and it made it look like there was more of it! What could I do to add to the vanilla one? In the end I added a couple of tablespoonfuls of full fat Greek yoghurt and this made the mixture go further. In future, I will switch my phone off until the cake is in the oven so I’m not distracted!

Then it was time to spoon the mixture into the prepared Bundt pan. I put a layer of chocolate in first, then the whole layer of vanilla, followed by the rest of the chocolate batter. I then got a skewer and swirled it so that there would be a marble effect. I tried not to swirl it too much.

The cake went into the oven for about 50 minutes and the chocolate aroma in the kitchen was making me so hungry. On a Sunday when I was baking this, we don’t usually eat at lunchtime unless we go out. We usually have a full English at breakfast which keeps us going until teatime. But for some reason I felt ravenous today.

When the cake came out of the oven, I was so dissatisfied. The cake hadn’t risen much at all. Apart from my mistake with the water added to the cocoa powder, I wondered if it was the baking powder I had used. I’ll buy more and see if my next bake comes out any better.

After the cake had cooled down for 10 minutes, I took it out of the pan and thankfully it slid out beautifully. I was so disappointed in the cake’s appearance as from the outside I couldn’t tell it was a marble cake. Maybe I hadn’t swirled the mixture enough. But then I didn’t want to swirl it too much!

The chocolate icing was made on the hob by melting chocolate, butter and some golden syrup together. This gave a thick but glossy old fashioned icing which was delicious but not too rich. It was easy to spread on top of the cake as well.

To finish off, I found some Dr Oetker sprinkles in my stash which complemented the chocolate nicely. These were leftover from a chocolate cake I had made late last year and always look pretty.

Happy Baking!

Love Sam xx