A reader recently asked me if I had a recipe for marble cake, and I was (quietly, politely) aghast. People eat it...by choice? I'm sorry if it's your favorite and now we cannot be friends, but I'd only experienced it in settings where it was just one step above no cake at all, usually dry and managing to taste like neither chocolate nor vanilla. In life, but in cake baking especially, I think we should all aspire to do one thing really well before making things more complicated. I'm so glad she pressed me, because it led me to read about the cake's origins in Germany, where it is known as Marmorkuchen, a deeply beloved birthday standard. This inspired me to do some fancy fractions with a favorite rich chocolate cake to divide it into vanilla and dark-chocolate parts. It was a very good cake, but this one is even better, thanks to a friend and fellow food blogger, Luisa Weiss—who lives in Berlin and wrote Classic German Baking, a book no baker should miss—who, from a neighbor, learned a trick of using melted white chocolate in the vanilla portion instead of leaving it plain. But don't run away if you don't like white chocolate. Here, it adds a complex toastiness, and makes a luxurious textural match for the chocolate swirls—not something you endure just to get to them.
Recipe information
Yield
Makes 12–16 servings
Ingredients
Cake:
To finish:
Preparation
Step 1
Heat the oven to 350°F. Coat the inside of a Bundt pan with nonstick spray, or butter and flour every nook and cranny well. Cream the butter and sugar together with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, scraping down the bowl between additions. Beat in the vanilla and sour cream until smooth, then add the milk. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over batter, and mix until thoroughly combined. Add 2 cups of the flour to the batter, and mix until just combined.
Step 2
Scoop half of the batter—you can eyeball it—into a separate bowl, and stir the melted white chocolate into it until fully combined; then stir in 1/3 cup flour.
Step 3
Stir the cocoa powder and melted dark chocolate into the other half of batter.
Step 4
Drop or dot large spoonfuls of the white chocolate batter into the bottom of your prepared cake pan. Drop or dot large spoonfuls of the dark chocolate batter over that, checkerboarding it a little. Continue until all the batter is used. Use a skewer to marble the batters together in figure-8 motions.
Step 5
Bake the cake until a toothpick or skewer inserted into the center comes out batter-free, 40 to 50 minutes.
Step 6
Let cool completely in the pan on a cooling rack, then invert onto a cake plate.
To finish:
Step 7
Heat the cream and chocolate together, and stir until just melted. Spoon over the fully cooled cake, and use the back of a spoon to nudge the drippings down in places. Refrigerate cake to set the chocolate coating; leftovers keep best in the fridge as well.
Recipe notes
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