Easter-slash-birthday cake

MINT-CHOCOLATE MARBLE SOURDOUGH CAKE 

HAPPY EASTER!

10.30am: The troops are gathering. And by "troops", I mean my large family – who are far from doing anything together with military precision!

Today, we're also having an early celebration of my nephew/godson's birthday which is on April 3. My mother asked him what cake he wanted, he told her he'd like a mint-flavoured cake, she asked me if I had a recipe for said cake... and in my family, "Do you have the X recipe?" is code for "Can you make the X?"

I'm not complaining. I was going to make a crepe cake with a caramelised banana filling (I have a ton of frozen bananas), but that will just have to do for another day. This cake would have required more effort than a mint-flavoured cake anyway – all that standing over the stove and cooking 25 or more crepes.

After successfully adapting the King Arthur Flour chocolate sourdough cake recipe for a two-toned matcha sourdough cake, I decided to make the mint cake the same way, this time marbling two colours as well as two flavours.

The un-iced cake

And so I made a plain white sourdough cake batter and divided it. I flavoured one portion with peppermint and coloured it a soft green with food gel, and added cocoa powder to the other portion. The batters were then layered in a baba pan and swirled by cutting through them with a butter knife as the pan is rotated once. Just eight knife cuts are sufficent. The sourdough batters are thicker and stickier than normal cake batter, so there might be a tendency to swirl more than normal.

I tasted some crumbs when the cake was done, and there was a nice combination of mint and chocolate – which would be more pronounced once I added the two icings. But I couldn't tell what the inside would look like until my nephew cut it at his party.  

To be continued after the cutting of the cake...

The swirls in the crumb; (inset) embarrassing the just-turned-teenager with little-girl candles

5.52pm: The swirls on the inside of the cake didn't come out as evenly as I had hoped but they were all right. My nephew was very pleased with the minty taste, and that is all that matters to me.