The Marble Cake Bake Off

Your early access to the results + an interview with the winning recipe developer!

Where do you think marble cake originated?

*giving you time to think*

If you guessed Germany, you are correct!

According to my research, in its earliest iterations in Germany, marble cake (also known as marmorkuchen or zebra cake) was actually not composed of the chocolate and vanilla swirls that we now recognize as marble cake in the U.S. The darker portion was actually hued with molasses and spices, and the cake base itself was a sweet yeasted bread versus the more typical butter cake of today’s American marble cake.

Of course, you can marble a cake with whatever you like (imagine a strawberry, or matcha swirl), but for this bake off, we focused on the now-classic chocolate and vanilla combination.

While this felt like a straightforward bake off on its face, I kept finding more and more complicating factors as I delved into more recipes. Besides the normal factors like butter vs. oil vs. sour cream vs. milk etc, there was tons of other things to consider.

For example: to make the chocolate portion, the most common technique is to simply divide the batter in two and stir in cocoa powder. But you can swap the cocoa for melted chocolate, you can add sugar or butter or milk or leavener to the chocolate portion, you can add WHITE chocolate to the vanilla batter, etc.

Not to mention the marbling technique! Some use the checkerboard technique, some simply alternate pouring the batters on top of each other, and while most use a knife to marble the layers together, King Arthur insists that pouring the batters together will achieve a sufficient marbled look (ahem, I might disagree here).

In any case, it was a challenge (as always) to narrow down the contenders to just 9. But below you’ll find the recipes I ultimately chose along with the rankings!

Marble Cake Bake Off Results

Below you’ll find a sneak peek at the marble cake bake off results (the full bake off post will go out to everyone late next week). A reminder that even though rankings require that someone fall into “last place," each cake is perfect to someone and in its own right!

An important thing to note is that I thought nearly all of these cakes got markedly better (i.e. more moist) a day or two after being baked. I was surprised by how dry most of them were during the day-of tasting (sitting out for an hour after being sliced into slivers probably didn’t help), but most softened after sitting in an enclosed container.

So as always, take these results with a grain of salt. What didn’t really change after a day or two was the chocolate flavor! It was quite mild in most of the cakes.