60/99: Marble Cake

 

I bought the Heritage bundt pan from William Sonoma a few weeks ago and have been dying to use it.  I just haven't had a bundt cake opportunity lately.  I used to really dislike bundt cakes because I thought they were boring and too grown up. A bundt cake is the Christmas gift from the neighbor that no one really wants.  I always think of My Big Fat Greek Wedding's quote, "there's a hole in this cake!" Honestly who can't relate? Why do we have cakes with holes in them?

But the heritage pan is just cool.  It's worth having a hole in the cake.  And totally worth making a bundt cake. I should have taken downward shot because it looks like a flying saucer.  And just so you know, flying saucer = cool.  (Note- this is not an advertisement / sponsored by Nordicware- I just really like their pan). 

The marble cake was pretty basic.  It's a butter cake with a whopping 2+ sticks of butter.   Once you make the vanilla batter, you separate about 1/3 of it and add a bunch of chocolate.  Then comes the tricky part:  Rose said to put a third of the batter in the bottom of the pan and then put dollops of the chocolate on top.  Then you repeat. Eventually you end up with 2 layers of chocolate dollops and 3 layers of vanilla.  Then you have to get a tablespoon and make some sort of wavelike motion by sticking it through the cake.

Have you ever painted and mixed a little bit of black with a little bit of white? As much as you would just love to swirl the two together, most of the time it just turns out to be grey mess.  That's exactly what I was expecting with this cake: light brown mess.  The good thing is that no matter how it looked, I knew it would taste good.

Thankfully it turned out to look more like a rainbow than a puddle:

The ganache on top was just chocolate and heavy cream. It was the perfect compliment to the cake underneath.  

I took it to a party and I think it got overshadowed by about 20 other desserts that other people brought.  Only a few slices were eaten.  But, the people who ate them told me they were really good.  That's always good news.  Once I brought it home, my friends finished off the majority of the rest of it.  We all liked it-especially the ganache (straight chocolate never fails). Sadly, after having the pumpkin cheesecake the day before, the cake was definitely overshadowed for the week. It's a great marble cake recipe but it wasn't a cake to write home about.