Chocolate and vanilla marble cake and some cupcakes

Last Friday was spent baking with my two best friends. (How on earth did a week pass so quickly?!)Our bake-athons don't happen very often anymore, due to us being boring adults living in different places, but they are still fun when they do happen.

Apologies for the photo quality. These were all taken with my phone.

This is a classic compromise cake. Chocolate or vanilla? Both! Pink or chocolate icing? Both! Marshmallows, chocolate stars or Barbie sprinkles for decoration? CHUCK IT ALL ON!

We also baked some marshmallow cupcakes from the first Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. The melted marshmallow for the cupcake centre is the most unruly thing I've ever worked with. It was near impossible to put it inside the cupcake so we gave up after a four and put jam in the rest. Half the batch were finished with pink vanilla butter icing and marshmallows and the rest were covered with a layer of marzipan.

I love how it looks like a plain chocolate cake, but all is revealed when you cut into it.

There's always something exciting about a marble cake because you can never really predict how the marbled effect will turn out. Well, I find it exciting. Maybe I don't get out enough?(!)

We enjoyed a slice of cake each after dinner with a cuppa.

I enjoyed our marble cake so much that I made another one this week at home. Unfortunately it got devoured before my camera got anywhere near it.

Chocolate and vanilla marble cake

We used the one-weight method for our cake where the weight of the eggs are equal to the weight of the butter, sugar and self-raising flour . We used three eggs which weighed roughly 175g/6oz so that was our weight for everything else.

Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4 and grease and line two 7 inch tins. Creamed the butter and sugar until light and fluffy then gradually added the eggs and fold in the flour. Divide the mixture into two bowls, adding cocoa powder (to taste) to one half and a few drops of vanilla extract to the other half. Add a small amount of milk to the chocolate mixture to slacken it after adding the cocoa powder.  Haphazardly dollop the mixtures alternately into the two tins and bake them in the centre of the oven for roughly 20-25 minutes until springy to touch. Leave the cakes to cool in the tin for a few minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to finish cooling. Once cool, sandwich the sponges together with vanilla butter icing and ice the top layer with chocolate butter icing. Decorate with marshmallows, sprinkles or whatever you fancy!