French-style chocolate marble cake (gâteau marbré-inspired)
🌱🍫 Do you know how to use up leftover Christmas chocolate? It’s a piece of cake! Bake a delicious French-style marble cake with stunning swirls of chocolate and vanilla. Like most traditional cakes the ingredients are simple but the outcome is a funky look. Follow Grandma Sita’s zero-waste hacks, save yourself an extra trip to the shops, and bake a plant-based cake with whatever leftovers you have in your pantry from a mix of nuts, halved chocolate bars, or almost empty jam jars, anything works well. Small habits can have a big impact and taste delicious!
👩🍳🇫🇷 Eléa joined A Grandchild in My Kitchen, Grandma Sita’s cooking challenge, and they baked Eléa’s family recipe of marble cake, which is one of the French kids’ favorites, fun to make and slice into. This yummy plant-based recipe is inspired by the popular “Gâteau marbré, ” a great classic of French home cooking perfect for dessert, tea time or just to snack on.
INGREDIENTS
DRY INGREDIENTS
150g of cane sugar
250g of flour
11g of baking powder
1/2 tsp of vanilla powder
1 tbsp of cocoa powder
A hint of salt
WET INGREDIENTS
350g soy drink with vanilla
120g of olive oil
1 tbsp of apple cider vinegar
1 tbsp of rum (optional)
METHOD
1. Preheat the oven to 170C, without the fan.
2. Combine wet ingredients soy drink, vinegar, and sugar in the immersion blender jar.
3. In a bowl, sift the flour and baking powder and mix this in the previous bowl, with a whisk, without stirring too much.
4. Add the oil and salt, and mix gently.
5. Split the batter in two. In the first half, add the vanilla. In the other half, add the cocoa powder and optionally the rum.
6. Pour the batter into a loaf pan, alternating between the vanilla batter and the chocolate one.
7. After 10 minutes of baking, cut the cake. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes more. Et voilà!
🧓🏻🤎 Grandma Sita’s hacks:
*The best place to store chocolate is in an airtight container inside a cool, dry, dark place like a pantry or cupboard away from the light. If stored properly, the shelf life of most milk chocolate is one year and for most dark chocolate, it’s two years.
*You should not refrigerate chocolate or things covered in chocolate, but you can freeze it. Sometimes, you may be in a hot place where it’s difficult to keep your chocolate from melting. In this case, it’s okay to refrigerate it in an airtight container.
*Chocolate does not spoil in the same way that perishable foods do. Still, its taste, texture, and appearance may change over time affecting the overall quality and enjoyment of the product.
*Keep your eyes out for ethical labels of chocolate on the packaging that guarantee a sustainable supply chain.
📗 “Gâteau marbré” means marbled cake, due to the drawings created by alternating the vanilla and the chocolate dough. It’s also called zebra cake because of its zebra-striped pattern. There are other flavor combi possibilities strawberry (or other fruits), coffee, and cinnamon (or other spices).
🌎 Shopping, storing, and cooking food are fundamental daily. All of us can take action to manage our food better to avoid wasting and transition our diets to be more planet-friendly before, during, and after any holiday season. Every bit counts.
🍽️ Check out more tasty plant-based recipes from A Grandchild in My Kitchen, the Grandma Sita cooking challenge twisting worldwide family recipes into new plant-based zero-waste ones.