Zebra Cake

This post has been long pending. I never really got down to making a Zebra cake. I don’t know why!!
Few days back I was mourning the demise of my trusty oven. It had been with me for the past 10 years and now after so much blessed baking its life span was over. I didn’t want to replace it because the same model was difficult to be found and I did not want to downgrade. After much hemming and hawing I finally decided to go in for an OTG.
 Now the OTG was home and it was time to bake after a mourning period of almost a month. The big Q was what to start with. I knew I wanted to bake a simple cake as I was not familiar with the thermostat setting of this new appliance. I didn’t want to waste much batter in case I got the reading wrong. I remembered that the time when my last oven conked off I was in the process of baking brookies. All that precious chocolate went waste.
So a simple cake but not too simple. And then it struck me..why not a Zebra cake.


Ingredients

3 cups flour
1 cup sugar
½ cup butter, at room temperature
½ cup oil
4 eggs
1 cup milk
2 tsp baking powder

For the cocoa batter
3 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tbsp coffee powder
2 tbsp sugar
¼ cup milk

Line and grease a 9” pan. Preheat the oven at 180 degrees Celsius.
Mix together the cocoa batter. Make a thick paste and ensure that no lumps remain.
Sift the flour and baking powder. Whip together the oil and butter. Add the sugar and whip till creamy. Add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Now sift in the flour and add the milk in batches start with 1/3 flour, then ½ the milk, 1/3 flour, rest of the milk and finally 1/3 of the remaining flour. Now take out a little more than 1/3 of the batter and put it in another pan. Add the cocoa mix to the batter which is less.

Now comes the fun part. Take two clean ladles each for the dark and white batters. First put a ladle of white batter in the middle of the cake tin. Then pour a ladle of the cocoa batter in the middle of the white batter. Now keep repeating this process. The batters have to be put only in the very middle.

As you keep pouring the earlier batter keeps getting pushed away towards the rim of the cake tin. Soon you have these concentric rings of dark and white batter.

Now bake it at 180 degrees Celsius for 50 minutes.

Let it cool a bit and then cut a slice to admire the beautiful Zebra stripes.