Marble Cake
Make either of the white cake mixtures, take out about half a cupful and color it light red with strawberry or currant syrup.
Butter a cake mould, flour it, and shake out the surplus flour, leaving the mould thinly coated. Drop lumps of cake batter in the mould with a teaspoon, paint them over with a knife dipped in the red batter, but without flattening or smoothing or running the lumps together. Drop more spoonfuls of the cake mixture in the hollows and paint them over with the knife blade dipped in red as before, and so fill the mould to within an inch of the top. There will be fine waving lines of pink through the cake when cut. Chocolate and white can be used in the same way. The snow cake mixture is apt to be too soft to keep form by spoonfuls, unless quite cold. "Luck" is the poorest possible ingredient in cake making. The same cause will always produce the same effect. The exact proportions that will make a splendid cake one time will make the same every time if put together the same way. The question is only to find the right proportions.
This is a method rather than a formula — it assumes you already have a white cake batter from elsewhere in the book and tells you how to marble it. The whole thing hinges on batter that holds its shape.
- The hinge: stiff batterThe lumps must sit as lumps. If the batter slumps into a level sheet the streaking disappears, so a firm creamed batter works and a thin one does not. As the text says of the snow cake mixture, chill the batter thoroughly if it is too soft to hold a spoonful.
- "Cake mould"The recipe does not say what shape; a tube pan or deep loaf pan will both serve, buttered and floured as directed rather than sprayed. How full "to within an inch of the top" leaves the mould depends on the depth of the tin.
- Coloring with fruit syrupStrawberry or currant syrup adds sugar and liquid as well as color, so the tinted portion will be a little looser than the rest. Commercial pancake-style syrups will not color it; a reduced fruit syrup or a small amount of beet or fruit powder gives the pink without loosening the batter.
- The chocolate versionThe text gives no quantities for it. Whether you use melted chocolate or cocoa, the aim is to keep the dark batter close in consistency to the pale one, since that is what makes the knife-painting work; cocoa may need a little milk beaten in to match.
- Painting, not swirlingModern marbling usually means dragging a skewer through two poured layers. Here the knife blade only films the outside of each lump, which is what produces "fine waving lines" rather than broad blotches. Over-working it with a skewer gives a muddy pink cake.
- No oven temperature givenBake as the underlying white cake directs. Failing that, 350F is right for a butter cake of this kind — 45 to 55 minutes in a tube pan, tested with a skewer in the center.
- YieldDepends entirely on the white cake mixture you start from, which is given elsewhere in the book.
Marble cake is a nineteenth-century American parlor cake, and in its earliest printed forms the dark half was not chocolate at all but a batter darkened with molasses, brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves and soda — chocolate marbling became common only as cocoa grew cheap and reliable late in the century. This version has a pink-and-white variant, tinted with fruit syrup. The closing homily is worth noting as much as the method: the insistence that "luck" has nothing to do with it, and that fixed proportions give fixed results, can be read as of a piece with the argument that trade manuals and the emerging domestic-science movement were making in the same decades, as baking shifted from judgment by feel toward weighed and measured formulas.