Gâteau marbré is a great classic of French home cooking. Both simple and decadent, cake marbré is the ideal cake to give to kids for their after school snack or to serve with tea or coffee. French kids just love to discover how will the swirls turn out…
Gâteau marbré is a great classic of French home cooking. Both simple and decadent, cake marbré is the ideal cake to give to kids for their after school snack or to serve with tea or coffee. French kids just love to discover how will the swirls turn out…
This cake is one of French kid’s favorite. Buttery, moist, flavorful and with a cute look. For the “goûter” afternoon snack of course but also at breakfast, for dessert for example with plain yoghurt… Decadent chocolate and a nice and funny look. You’ll never know which design to expect before cutting the first peace. A neat zebra look, funny swirls or a complete mess up with parts with only chocolate and parts with none. Depending on how it was made and how it came out while baking. Very often it’s a WOW effect!
The idea of this cake is to make a classic batter (you can even replace this recipe by one of yours). Then you have to divide the dough in two parts: 1/3rd of the quantity on one side and 2/3rd on the other side. Then melted chocolate is added in the 1/3 portion and vanilla in the ⅔ one, this way you should roughly get two preparations, one with vanilla flavors and one with chocolate, roughly of the same volume.
Now comes the fun part. My daughters use to love to do this. Depending on your mold: bunt or round, pour a bit of chocolate then vanilla then chocolate, then vanilla… again and again. Or just make a few layers if you don’t have time or just don’t feel like it.
This cake was bake for a charity event just before Christmas, therefore I tried to give a festive look with chocolate and a nice heart of hazelnuts sautéed with unrefined muscovado sugar. It’s of course optional.
A delicious twist to this classic recipe is to change vanilla for cinnamon and ginger powder, 1 tablespoon of each.
Chocolate and Vanilla Marble Cake (French gâteau marbré)
Ingredients
- 5 eggs
- 150 gr sugar
- 180 gr butter
- 265 gr flour
- 1 pack baking powder
- 1 pinch salt
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract more or less according to your product
- 120 gr dark chocolate
Optional topping
- 2 handfuls hazelnuts
- 2 tablespoons muscovado sugar if not brown sugar
- 1 knob butter
- icing sugar
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 170 °C.
Prepare the batter
- In a bowl (or using your food processor), whisk the 5 eggs with sugar, until the preparation whitens and gets a smooth texture.
- Melt butter and add it to the egg-sugar mixture, stir immediately.
- Apart, combine the dry powders (flour, baking powder and salt). Add this to the previous preparation and gently combine.
Make the two flavors and assemble
- Melt dark chocolate in the microwave or ideally in a bain-marie.
- Separate the dough in 2/3rd and 1/3rd. Mix the chocolate with the smallest portion (thus of
- 1/3rd) and add vanilla in the biggest portion (thus of 2/3rd).
- Grease with butter or oil and flour a mold (here round mold of about twenty centimeters of diameter). Then add successively a little bit of vanilla preparation then a bit of the chocolate preparation. Tap the mold between each new filling so that the dough will spread a bit on the whole surface of the mold. Continue again and again alternatively with chocolate and vanilla dough.
Bake
- Bake for 45 to 50 minutes, check if the cake is well cooked with the tip of a knife. When baked, flip it over a dish.
If you choose to add the optional hazelnut topping
- In a pan, heat sugar with butter, add hazelnuts let caramelize over medium heat, stirring regularly for about ten minutes.
- Neatly arrange those caramelized hazelnuts on the cake and sprinkle with icing sugar.
