Marbled chocolate cake

A quick cake, easy to make, but quite impressive to look at. I've made this cake before, a few months ago and it was very well received, so I decided that a repeat performance wouldn't be badly received by my colleagues at work. A classic pound cake type recipe, with equal quantities of flour, butter, sugar and eggs with a little milk to loosen the mixture. You can find the recipe I used here. Although it looks like a faff to create the marbled effect, it's actually extremely easy. As the recipe explains, you make up the whole mixture as vanilla, pour/scoop half into another bowl (not so good for the washer-upper of the household, me in my case!) add a couple of tablespoons of cocoa and mix well. I suppose you should sift the cocoa to make mixing it in easier, but I didn't, and it didn't seem to matter too much. For the swirling (which I feel has come out quite well!) I blobbed (a technical term) large spatula-fuls of mixture into the tin, 6 blobs alternating vanilla and chocolate and another blob in the centre using about half of the mixture. Then with the other half of the mixture I repeated the process but opposite, so that if vanilla was on the bottom, chocolate was above it and vice versa. For swirling, the recipe recommends a skewer, but I tried this the first time I made it and it just wasn't wide enough to move the mixture. This time I used the handle of a dessert spoon, which worked well.

I think mine took about 5 minutes more to cook than the recipe recommends. It rises really well, and although the amount seems a bit mean in the tin, it looks great when it's baked, with a lovely little peak.

The photo below shows the inside marbling of the cake. Apologies for the poor photography, it was night time and so all the colours are a little odd. Lovely and moist, a very well received cake!