Orange Marble Cake

I found a recipe in an old recipe book for this marble orange cake. It uses very few ingredients.

For the regular cake :

250 grams of butter, sugar and self-raising flour

4 eggs

I reduced the sugar to 200 grams.

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Method : Cream sugar and butter till white and fluffy. Add in eggs, one by one. Add in flour.

Separate the batter into two portions.

PORTION A – ORANGE :

Add the zest and juice of one orange and mix.

PORTION B – CHOCOLATE

Add about 100 grams melted cooking chocolate or 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder.

In a suitable size baking tin, drop spoonsful of the chocolate and orange batter. Do not swirl as it will naturally form designs.

I said suitable size baking tin means the quantity of the batter must reach up to half the level of the tin. I use a 4″ x 6″ loaf tin.

Bake in a preheated oven for 45-60 minutes at 180 deg celcius. Leave the cake to cool.

Meanwhile, make an orange syrup with the zest and juice of 1 orange and 2 tablespoon icing sugar. Other sugar is fine but icing sugar will give a thicker syrup as there is cornflour in icing sugar.

Pour the orange syrup over the marble orange cake to get a zesty and yet chocolatey marble cake. Yummy.

Marble Butter Cake

Making nice cakes involve precise measurements. One cannot skip or add extra ingredients. For e.g., my cake recipe needs only 4 eggs. On that day, my naughty toddler had cracked 5 eggs which I just bought from the supermarket. Therefore, I used 5 eggs. The cake turned out a bit hard and crispy on the outside.

The butter and sugar must be beaten fast and hard to avoid the butter melting too much. The butter and sugar has to end up fluffy and white. To get the best result, use a electric cake mixer. Nowadays, they are sold for less than RM100.

Add in egg one by one, alternating with flour. I.e. One egg, fold (as in gentle motion with a wooden spoon), add flour, fold, one egg, fold, flour etc.

I was making marble butter cake. So, just take out one quarter of the batter (after completed mixing) and add some cocoa powder plus some cooking chocolate.

Just plop the chocolate and white portion alternately. Then swirl with a chopstick.

Note that some cracks appeared on the top of the cake? It is because the cake tin is too small and there is not enough place for the cake to rise.

Basic Butter Cake

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Ingredients
1 block butter = 250 gm (best brand SCS or Golden Churn)
230 gm castor sugar
4 eggs (find the biggest egg you can)
250 self-raising flour
2 tsp vanilla essence
about 6 tbsp UHT milk

Heat oven to 180 deg C. Line cake tin, size about 8 inches in diameter. In a mixer, beat butter and sugar till white and fluffy. Add in eggs one at a time, alternating with flour. Add vanilla essence to milk and mix in. Check the consistency of the batter. It should be of dropping consistency. If it stands peaking and hard, add more milk. Pour into baking tin and bake for about 50 mins.

Tadaaa… the golden butter cake.

To avoid your cake cracking, make sure your batter is a little less than half the height of your cake tin. Do not attempt to put all into one cake tin if the quantity is too much or you will end up with cracked surface, uncooked middle and very hard crusts or even burnt. Leave whatever quantity behind and make a baby cake. Or cupcakes.

Bake some of these cakes for Chinese New Year. Practise now so that you are more adept by Chinese New Year which is exactly a week away. People loves butter cake on Chinese New Year. I don’t know why but they just do. Don’t bother buying those lousy ones made with butter essence which leaves a sickening flavour in your mouth.

I have a lot of variants of cakes like green tea cake, chempedak cake, banana cake, orange cake, marble pound cake, all using the above recipe.