Week 22: Marbled Ring Cake (Ciambella Marmorizzata)

The book: The Silver Spoon

The recipe: p1222, "Marbled Ring Cake (Ciambella Marmorizzata)"

Honestly, you wait all year for a cake then two come along at once. Still, this contribution from The Silver Spoon immediately appears a very different proposition to last week's adventure in layering and icing - it's filed under the "Tea-Time Cakes" section of the Italian cookery bible, so it presumably won't be particularly cloying in its sweetness, and the ingredient list is mercifully short and uncomplicated. Plus I'm now the proud owner of not one but two cake tins, so I might as well make use of them.

"Marbled"?

It's worth noting that this is how The Silver Spoon chooses to illustrate the recipe in question. Considering it involves cocoa and icing sugar, for two things, I tend to suspect there's been an editorial mix-up somewhere along the line. Either that or something very odd will be happening in my oven.

The prep: Ah, hang on a minute - so much for simplicity. Whether it's supposed to match the illustration or not, the recipe for this Marbled Ring Cake does call for a ring mould. I don't own one of them, but you'd think something along those lines would be easy enough to source locally - a tube pan or even a more intricate and frilly Bundt pan would do the trick just fine, after all. Basically anything that'll result in a cake with a hole in the middle, whatever size the hole may be.

But of course that'd be too easy. One protracted traipse around the Lewisham Centre later, I remain empty-handed and bereft of Bundt. Sainsbury's, Argos, M&S, BHS, Tiger, Poundland, Poundstretcher, your boys gave me one hell of a beating. Even TK Maxx lets me down, and their entire business model is basically to stock one of everything.

Now, at this point, it seems three options are available to me. Firstly, just cook the thing in a regular cake tin and forego the pleasing-on-the-eye ring shape altogether (and risk a cake with a soggy middle in doing so). Secondly, ask on Twitter to see if anyone local has a suitable tin I can borrow for the occasion.

Or thirdly, improvise.

Amazing what you can achieve with some baking paper, tin foil and baking beans, isn't it? OK, so this isn't going to result in an attractive ring cake with nice curved sides - but it's a ridiculous solution that seems entirely fitting for a project where I'm using a random number generator to decide what I get to eat, for heaven's sake, so I'm happy.

Remarkably, fresh ingredients (eggs and milk) aside, there's nothing else in the recipe that I actually need to buy in, so my shopping ordeal is over once I finally give up on the pan-hunt. That's definitely something in this recipe's favour, although it does suggest the end result might be a little on the basic side.

The making: I would start by dusting the ring mould with sugar and flour, but that seems a bit pointless since I won't be turning the cake out at the end of proceedings, so I don't. Skipping to the next stage, flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and sugar are sifted together, before being folded into a mixture of eggs, melted butter and milk and stirred vigorously until nice and smooth. Standard cake batter procedure, in other words.

Next, one-third of the mixture is poured into another bowl, where some cocoa powder is sieved in and stirred through. Alternating spoonfuls of the plain mixture and the chocolate mixture are deposited in the cake tin, then a knife is drawn through the mixture to marble it. Sam struggles to understand the marbling concept when I try and explain it to him later, but fortunately I'm able to call upon an easy analogy from our field of mutual interest by way of illustration.

Baking the cakes of love

After 35-40 minutes in the oven, the cake is left to stand for a while before being turned out and dusted with icing sugar. And, wonder of wonders, my improvisation is broadly successful - a little bit of batter ends up seeping in at the edges, so the baking beans need some cleaning afterwards, but otherwise the contraption peels away easily to leave the desired hole in the middle. Hurrah!

The eating: On slicing, it becomes immediately clear that the desired marbling effect has failed to materialise, with the relative densities of the plain and chocolate batters instead resulting in two quite distinct layers. Still, I'm not serving this one up to a queue of tired parkrunners, so I'm less fussed about the presentation side of things than I might be had this recipe come up a week ago.

Layer Cake

As anticipated, the cake isn't particularly moist or sugary, but it goes perfectly well with a cup of tea or a double espresso (or a mug of octuple espresso, in my case). Following extensive experimentation, we can confirm it also goes well with a healthy dollop of Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie - but then most things do.

So, yeah. Not the most exciting of recipes (and I'm generally still waiting for The Silver Spoon to knock my socks off), but not a bad outcome and - let's be honest - well worth the effort if only for the comedy value of the kitchen utensil improvisation.

One-word verdict: Holey.