There’s A Zebra In My Cake!

Ok.

Don’t panic.

There’s not exactly a huge 4-legged wild animal from Africa IN my cake. Its just that my cake has absolutely impressive zebra stripes in it.

For the uninitiated, I am going to quote what is written by Connie Veneracion which will pretty much explain what this cake is all about:

“A zebra cake is basically a chocolate marble cake. The difference is in the pattern. Instead of the marbling created by running a knife through randomly dropped blobs of vanilla and chocolate cake batter, the zebra pattern is created by pouring small cupfuls of vanilla and chocolate cake batter one on top of the other. The last cupful of batter poured pushes the one below it causing it to spread.”

And it looks S-T-U-N-N-I-N-G.

Be it a safari themed birthday party or just a wow-cake for the weekend brunch, a zebra cake can create that right amount of impact. And it is so versatile! You can tweak the flavors to anything you like or want or keep it totally simple and orthodox.

I made a banana-peanut butter-chocolate zebra cake sprinkled with choco-chips this time. The taste – Umm mmm. And this is how it looked:

Banana-Peanut Butter-Chocolate-Choco Chips Zebra Cake:

Ingredients

1. 4 large eggs
2. 1 cup fine sugar
3. 1 cup milk (low fat is fine)
4. 1 cup vegetable oil
5. 1 and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
6. 2 cups all purpose flour
7. 1 tablespoons baking powder
8. 1/4 teaspoon salt
9. Chocolate chips (optional)

Additional ingredients for chocolate batter:

1. 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
2. 1 teaspoon chocolate flavor/essence (optional)

Additional ingredients for banana-peanut butter batter:

1. 1 ripe banana
2. 2 tablespoons peanut butter (I used smooth, but chunky is fine too)

Procedure

• Preheat oven to 180 degree centigrade.
• Lightly grease the bottom and sides of a round cake pan with vegetable oil.
• In a large bowl, mix together eggs and sugar until mixture is light and creamy and the sugar has mostly been dissolved. Stir in milk, vegetable oil, vanilla extract.
• In another bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder and salt. Pour into wet ingredients and whisk to combine.
• Divide the batter into two portions.
• In the first portion:  mix in the sifted cocoa powder and chocolate extract.
• In the second portion: mix in mashed ripe banana and peanut  butter and whisk well.
• Now in the prepared cake tin, put a ladle of peanut butter-banana batter into the center of the pan and let it spread slightly on its own. Now put a ladle of chocolate batter in the center of the vanilla. It will push out the other batter and, as it sits for a moment, will also spread itself. Alternating ladle-fulls of the two batters, repeat the technique until all the batter has been used up.
• Bake for 35-40 minutes, until the cake is light gold and a tester inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.
• Let the cake cool in the pan for 10-15 minutes, then take the cake out and cool a bit before slicing.

This is how it looked fresh out of the oven:

I digged in right into it!

Note:

• This post here from My Cake School is a good tutorial on how to create a zebra cake. Helps!
• The banana-peanut butter part of the cake turned out to be a little dense for me even though the taste was absolutely spot on – maybe next time I need some more baking powder for that half of the batter? Not sure. If you find a solution, let me know.

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