The Marble Cake we are Obsessed with

Hi hi! I am just popping in to share this marble cake recipe with you! When I was working on my sour cream pound cake I accidentally (happens every time) went down a pound cake rabbithole, and now we have this amazing marble cake recipe!

A few friends have actually said that they prefer this to my vanilla pound cake. Huge call. But I can see why. There's a tender vanilla cake base, swirled with a slightly denser chocolate pound cake, which I made with real chocolate, so it is super rich and almost fudgy.

You make the one batter, set some aside, add the chocolate to the rest, and then get to assembling and swirling.

Don't be intimidated. I'll break down the whole process for you, and there's a whole bunch of pictures to help you along the way.

Recipe testing for Marble Cake

During the recipe testing process, I made this marble cake a ton of different times. The first I went for a 50:50 split of chocolate and vanilla batter, which turned out to not be quite right - because the chocolate batter is super chocolatey, it overpowered the vanilla. I also absolutely screwed up the swirl.

We got there though - I ended up with about a ⅓ chocolate to ⅔ vanilla split which is delicious. I dialled back on the chocolate a little in the chocolate section as it was too dense in texture.

The rest of the testing was then just locking it all in - making it in different sized pans, playing around with bake time etc. etc. All the work was so worth it though because this cake is just so good.

The importance of room temperature ingredients.

This is a super important one for this marble cake recipe. I know that we say that ingredients always need to be room temperature (if specified), but for this recipe especially you want to make sure that your butter is nicely room temperature, as well as your eggs and your sour cream.

Because melted chocolate gets added into the batter, you want to make sure that the batter isn't too cool, which will cause the chocolate to harden and you will get little flecks of chocolate through your batter. Not the end of the world, but it is easy to avoid if you can.

If your house runs cold, you can pop your eggs into a bowl of warm water for 5-10 minutes before baking. Even if they are at 'room temperature' I find warming them slightly can help with this too.

Does this cake need a frosting?

Depends who you ask. I think it is delicious just as is. However, my Husband who has a tendency to put chocolate icing on anything he possibly, can, would disagree.

If you wanted to add a frosting to this marble cake, my easy brownie frosting works perfectly.

How to get a chocolate batter that isn't too dense but still tastes like chocolate

I did a ton of research when I started making this marble cake recipe - a lot of the recipes use cocoa in their chocolate portion of the batter. Not this one. I really wanted the chocolate flavour to shine through and not compromise texture, so I wanted to make sure I used melted chocolate rather than cocoa powder.

This gives a delightfully dense (in a good way) chocolate swirl through the marble cake. I also added in some sour cream to help increase the viscosity of the chocolate mixture so that there wasn't too much variation between the two batters (this was a tip from my friend Chelsea!).

Because you are increasing the ratio of batter to the amount of baking soda in the recipe along with adding two kinds of fat to the batter, the chocolate portion does bake up a tiny bit denser than the vanilla, but I love it that way.

How to assemble a marble cake

This seems like a silly thing to need to explain but I tried a bunch of different methods for this and much prefer this way. Some other recipes online get you to alternate layering the batter, or just blob it all in and swirl.

I found that doing three separate layers, making sure to bang down the batter and then swirling between each layer was the most effective way. You can see in the images below how I did that (they show a few steps rather than the entire process but it is essentially the same thing just in three layers)

I used a 1 Tbsp (#60) scoop for the chocolate batter and a 1.5 Tbsp (#40) scoop for the vanilla batter. Eyeballing it also works. See images below for how I assembled.

You don't have to be super accurate, you just want to make sure that you have a nice distribution of the two different batters.

A butter line down the middle

I do this almost every time that I make a pound cake now - I just pipe a little line of softened butter down the middle of the cake, which controls where it cracks in the oven. This is totally optional but I did a side by side comparison in my vanilla pound cake post!

Pullman vs Pound Pan

If you've been here for any amount of time you will know that I love using a Pullman Pan to bake pound cakes in. A pullman pan is slightly larger in size and square in shape and gives the most amazing polite sides on a cake. They are my favourite.

However, I know that most people do not own one, so I developed the recipe to be made in a 1lb loaf pan, with notes below the recipe on how to adapt for a pullman.

I did a full breakdown of a 1lb, 1.25lb and pullman pan along with how the cake looks baked in each in my vanilla pound cake post

Make sure that it is properly baked!

Because the marble cake batter can be quite heavy, you want to make sure that the cake is properly baked throughout. You can see in the photo below that this wasn't quite done - this is especially important if you are baking in a pullman pan. The cake wasn't quite finished baking, so there is a thin line near the bottom of the slice where the batter isn't quite done.

To avoid this, make sure that you test with a skewer, making sure you get near the bottom of the cake to check the crumb. A few moist crumbs attached is fine, but make sure if there are any signs of the cake being wet on the inside you leave it in for a little longer. If you are worried about it browning too much you can tent the pan with foil.