A Buttery Marble Cake and the Reluctance for Lent

A respite from pork is one thing, but butter, that's hard. Or at least I suppose so- I haven't done it yet.

This beauty was visiting San Francisco when I was.

Lustrous, radiant with life, butter is peerless- certainly irreplaceable. For the rest of Lent, I'll try to share recipes that shine when made with oil instead of butter and do not need rich golden eggs. But plain marble cake is not one of those. 

Truly beurre noisette/browned butter is all the rage lately. There's a reason for that- all the dairy richness announces itself with such chutzpah. Still sophisticated, but happily a lot less subtle. In a recipe for a plain cake, like a marble cake, it makes an audible (loud!) difference.

A good plain pound cake is a marvelous thing. Once you swirl chocolate batter throughout anything though, something tricky happens- there becomes a chocolate part and then a non-chocolate part. Chocolate is a bold, attention-getting flavor- it can be hard for more discrete delights to shine beside it. To make a great marble cake you need to make sure that the white part is not just the "non-chocolate" part but that it has a definite personality of its own. Brown butter makes a white batter that stands up to the flashy dark swirl running through it.

To make this marble cake I did four things differently than a marble cake recipe usually calls for. The first thing was browning the butter. As I had girls impatient for cake, I started with cool but still liquid butter so I could not hope for volume from creaming the butter and sugar together. Instead I beat it long with the addition of the (many) cold eggs- they chilled the butter and gained great volume. The second was preparing the pan- thick layer of butter spread in with bare fingertips and coated with coarse sugar rather than flour- the cake slipped effortlessly from the deeply fluted (cheap and poor-quality) pan and had a glittering crunchy crust. The third was to use melted dark chocolate to flavor some of the batter- rather than using cocoa powder and water as most recipes do, and the fourth difference was to add some finely chopped dark chocolate to the chocolate batter for punctuation and texture. The effect of all this was that each batter made the other shine- that dark contrast with the chunks of chocolate running through it highlighted the rich buttery purity of the lighter batter.

For this very generous cake (rising to the top of a large bundt pan), we will need:

225 g/1 C butter, plus an extra small lump for the pan
350 g/ 1 3/4 C sugar

6 eggs (yes, 6!)

10 ml/2 tsp. vanilla (homemade here)

390 g/3 C flour

20 ml/4 tsp baking powder

5 ml/1 tsp. salt

330 ml/ 1 1/3 C yogurt or buttermilk

150 g/6 oz. melted dark chocolate + 50 g/ 2 oz. chopped chocolate

some coarse sugar for the pan

First prepare the pan- using just your fingertips smear the soft butter all over the pan in a not very thin layer. Coat it all over with coarse sugar. 

Now we can brown the butter. I melted over medium heat and then kept dragging a silicone spatula over the bottom of the pan so as many of the milk solids as possible would have a chance to turn toasty bronze without blackening. Be gentle with it- take it off when it smells rich and a little like hazelnuts (noisettes!)- it can blacken suddenly.

Pour the butter into the mixing bowl and let it cool (I set it out on the veranda). Even if it is still liquid, you can beat in the sugar. Adding the eggs, one at a time and beating hard, will see the volume increase tremendously:

Those rich brown flecks are from the butter.

Add the salt and the vanilla.

The butter, sugar, and eggs beat up very fluffy.

Now mix the flour with the baking powder, blend in half, add half the yogurt/buttermilk, the rest of the flour, then the rest of the yogurt:

Now set aside a little less than half of the batter. Chop the dark chocolate, melt the 3/4 of it gently, and blend it into the batter, along with the bits of chopped chocolate.

Put some of the lighter batter into the pan and top with dabs of the chocolate batter, and then dabs of the rest of the lighter batter:

Swirl the batters together gently with a butterknife, and put in the 170 c/350 f oven.

Note there's plenty of room for the batter to rise- we're going to need it. The rich, heavy batter rises slowly to the top of the pan:

It needs over an hour for a wooden skewer plunged in to come out clean- this one took and hour and ten minutes. 

Let it rest a few minutes before turning it out onto a cake dish- it slips easily from the pan, The glittering, almost crisp crust makes a nice contrast to the moist interior, and saves the cake nicely from drying out should it stay around longer than a day.