In the last year or so, one of my good friends has gotten into baking. Until now I hadn’t seen any benefit to this whatsoever as not a crumb had passed my lips, but this past Sunday she came over, Rachel Allen’s Cake in hand, and we set about making this cake.
I’m no baker. I can follow a recipe, but whereas with cooking you can rejig things, substitute, improvise, baking is an exact science. So between her skipping entire sections of the recipe, and me using baking ingredients that went out of date in 2010, we were a bit surprised that the result was even edible. But, boy was it edible!
The batter was easy and included the regular suspects: butter, sugar (cream together), eggs (lightly beaten), vanilla, flour (sift in), baking powder (use extra if it’s from 2010). Mix together, divide in half, add cocoa to one half and leave the other as is. Simple.
Remember to do a fair bit of swirling with a skewer to get that marbled effect! And it is, of course, obligatory to throw cocoa powder all over your toaster.
Make a crumble topping with chocolate chunks, flour, sugar and cold butter rubbed together to form a thick crumb. Put on top of the batter and bake. If you have a fan oven, for heaven’s sake adjust the temperature. That fan is forever threatening to ruin my life by cooking things just 10 or 20 degrees too high.
If you don’t adjust the temperature you will just have a slightly browner version of Rachel’s cake (see above), but it will taste pretty darn good whatever you do. We were too busy eating to take a picture of the inside, but believe me it was marbled as a marbled thing!
So, there you go. My first attempt at home baking in quite a while and not a bad result. Maybe this Sweet Sundays thing will be a new trend. I do like cake…
Bon appetit!