Home › Cake-Making › Marble Cake
Marble Cake
The white part is made with one-half cupful of white sugar, one-half cupful of butter, half a cupful of sweet milk; whites of four eggs, two and one-half cupfuls of flour, one teaspoonful of baking powder. Flavor with lemon. For the spiced part take one cupful of brown sugar, one-half cupful of molasses, one-half cupful of butter, one cupful of sour milk. Take the yolks of five eggs, and the white of one egg, two cupfuls of flour, one teaspoonful of cinnamon, one of cloves, one nutmeg, one-half teaspoonful of soda.
Two separate batters, mixed and then dropped into one pan in alternating spoonfuls. The original assumes you already know how to bake a cake, so the pan, the temperature and the time are all missing.
- The hinge: keep the batters distinctDrop the two batters into the pan in alternating spoonfuls and drag a knife through once or twice at most. Stirring, or over-swirling, turns the whole thing a uniform muddy brown and you lose the marbling entirely.
- Oven and panBake at 350F. Combined, the two batters make roughly 10 cups, which needs a 10-inch tube pan or two large loaf pans; a tube pan bakes it through most reliably. Expect 55 to 70 minutes in a tube pan, and test with a skewer in the centre of the dark portion, which sets last.
- Sweet milk and sour milk"Sweet milk" is ordinary fresh milk. "Sour milk" was naturally clabbered milk, acidic enough to activate the soda; use buttermilk, or milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left to stand ten minutes. With fresh milk the dark batter has less acid for the soda to react with -- the molasses supplies some, but not all -- and the cake can taste faintly soapy.
- Two leaveners, on purposeThe white batter uses baking powder because it has no acid; the dark batter uses soda because the sour milk and molasses supply it. They are not interchangeable here.
- Nutmeg"One nutmeg" means a whole nut, grated, which comes to roughly two to three teaspoons depending on the size of the nut. That is a strong dose by modern taste; a teaspoon of pre-ground nutmeg gives a milder result.
- The egg arithmeticFive eggs cover it exactly: four whites for the light batter, and the fifth white plus all five yolks for the dark, so nothing is left over. Whip the butter and sugar well in each batter, then fold the light batter's whites in last, beaten to soft peaks.
- Flavor with lemonA teaspoon of lemon extract, or the finely grated zest of one lemon, in the white batter only.
- YieldA large cake, 16 to 20 slices. It keeps well for several days wrapped, and the molasses half improves on the second day.
Marble cake appears in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward, and the early versions are typically this pairing of a pale batter and a dark spiced one rather than the chocolate marbling familiar today. The dark half is essentially a small molasses-and-sour-milk spice cake, while the white half depends on beaten egg whites and commercial baking powder, which became widely available in the second half of the century. It is sometimes suggested that two-batter cakes helped use up separated eggs left from a custard or a frosting, though this recipe as written accounts for five whole eggs and leaves nothing over. The pattern was said to imitate marbled paper or veined stone, and the effect was the point, which is why cookbooks of this period give the two mixtures in such detail and the baking instructions in none at all.