Chocolate Malt Marble Cake with Peanut Butter Frosting.

The recipe for my Ovenly Bakery collaboration

Todays recipe is a special one. Created originally for my collaboration with Ovenly Bakery, it is a 6-inch chocolate and malt marbled layer cake with a ganache filling and the most amazing peanut butter frosting. My idea of heaven! The cake layers are made with oil, originally because the cake needed to last long enough to be delivered across America. I kept the oil in this published version simply because it makes for a wonderfully moist layer cake that has a great shelf life, and don’t worry if your not a fan of overly moist oil cakes that feel like discarded wet sponges, this isn’t at all like that. I doubt most people would be able to tell its made with oil instead of butter.

For the chocolate element of the recipe the swirl is created with cocoa powder and you have two choices; dutched or black cocoa. Now, if you're a fellow baking nerd, you’ll know that black cocoa is actually also a dutched cocoa but there is a marked difference in the flavour and colour. In this cake I like to use black cocoa as it gives the most dramatic marble effect, the colours of the two batters end up polar opposites which makes for a spectacular looking cake. With a regular dutched cocoa the flavour will have a little more depth and classic roasted chocolate flavours, with black cocoa you’ll get a simpler flavour but one that will remind you of oreos (it is the key ingredient in that cookie after all), dark and roasted. To make sure the cocoa gives as much flavour as it can it is bloomed with hot water before it is added to the cake, think of this like you would steeping tea; it helps to bring out the full flavour of the cocoa. The water also helps keep the texture of the cake as it was without the cocoa, which can really dry out a cake if added to an exiting recipe without adjusting it. For the ganache the recipe calls for milk chocolate which goes so brilliantly with the peanut butter frosting. When choosing the chocolate to use in this element I like to go with a ‘dark milk chocolate’, which simply means a milk chocolate with a higher than normal amount of cocoa solids, around 50-60%, which means this is a great halfway house chocolate, not as dark and intense as a traditional dark chocolate but also not as sweet as traditional milk chocolate. Its really the best of both worlds.

The peanut butter frosting is a new favourite, so light and fluffy and just the right amount of sweetness. So often classic peanut butter frostings are sugar bombs, unbearably sweet and too thick and pasty. This recipe really pulls back on the sugar which makes it creamier and lighter and much easier to frost a cake with.