Z for Zebra Cake!

I am a relatively new cook and surfing food blogs has become my latest pass time. There are so many ideas out there.. it mind boggling!! During this blog cruising, I came along Passionate About Baking. Its one helluva blog, I have to say. More than the content, the pictures pop out straight away. There is a lot I need to learn about food photography. And the cakes... ooooooh cakes Deeba makes. Hey that rhymes!! It makes you want to eat them right from the pictures. She is an awesome photographer ( I would be blind to say otherwise ) and a great baker. There are some more recipes there that I am definitely going to try like Roasted Garlic Focaccia and  Kathci Biryani


Anyways, I was looking around for some simple yet different cake to bake for my husband's birthday. Google.....links......and blogs later, I came upon this zebra cake. Its a regular cake, just different looking! Perfect for S.... he likes the old fashioned home baked cakes. And the stripes would definitely interest my kids.

First time I followed the recipe to the T. It looked and tasted delicious. I am posting the recipe verbatim from Deeba's blog.

Ingredients:

Eggs – 4

Sugar – 1 cup
Milk – 1 cup
Oil – 1 cup
Vanilla extract – 1 tsp
Self-raising flour – 2 cups (I used plain flour + 2 tsps of baking powder + 1/4 tsp salt)
Dark cocoa powder – 4-5 tbsps

Get Cooking

• In a large mixing bowl, combine eggs and sugar until creamy and light in colour.
• Add milk and oil, and continue beating until well blended.
• Add vanilla extract to the mixture. Gradually add flour and then beat until the batter is smooth and the dry ingredients are thoroughly incorporated.
• Divide the mixture into 2 equal portions. Keep one portion plain. Add cocoa powder into another and mix well. The color of the cocoa batter should be quite dark, so add more if needed.
• Preheat the oven to 180C. (I lined the bottom of my 9″ Victoria sandwich tin & greased & floured the sides.)
• The most important part is assembling the cake batter in a baking pan. This is what you do. Scoop 3 heaped tablespoons of plain batter (you can also use a ladle that would hold 3 tablespoons) into the middle of the baking pan. Then scoop 3 tablespoons of cocoa batter and pour it in the center on top of the plain batter.
  NOTE: Do not spread the batter or tilt the pan to distribute the mixture. It will spread by itself and fill the pan gradually. Continue alternating the batters until you finish them.
• Bake in the oven for about 40 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.
  
  

Second attempt was just few days ago. This time around, I made little modifications. I used 2 tablespoon of cocoa powder and added 1/2 tsp of instant coffee powder. I also doubled the amount of vanilla  extract. It still looked and tasted delicious. Next time I will probably add more coffee powder for stronger flavor.

This is really a  fun cake..... go ahead and make it. My daughter really enjoyed assisting me and staring at the cake as it baked. There was constant updates on how the cake was doing inside oven!!

Sending this post for Tried and Tested event - Passionate About Baking. Find more information about the event at zlamushka's blog and Lakshmi's Kitchen Chronicles.