Chocolate and Vanilla Zebra Cake Hearts

So maybe the most appropriate start to my blog would be a post about the cakes that are currently my background picture. Those little bad boys are chocolate and vanilla zebra cake hearts. Bit of a mouthful to say but a totally tasty mouthful to eat.

Zebra cake is a bit of a trend at the moment. It’s just like marble cake in that you make two batters and mix them together to create a cool looking cake, but zebra cake takes a little more effort. You can create the zebra effect in two ways; piping or spooning. Whichever method you choose, you want to create rings of the different cake batters which, when baked and sliced, end up looking like zebra stripes.

The final product, before baking, should look something like this. 

Once baked, it looks like this

To make my cake hearts I baked my batter in a rectangular cake tin (about 15x8 inches) then used a heart-shaped cookie cutter to stamp out heart shapes.

For this is the recipe I used:

100g dark chocolate

100g butter

25ml flavourless oil (e.g. sunflower)

75ml natural yogurt or buttermilk (depending on what you have in the fridge)

175g caster sugar

2tsp vanilla extract

2 large eggs

100ml milk

50g ground almonds + 1tsp baking powder (x2)

50g plain flour (x2)

Method:

Preheat the oven to fan 160 (or 180 in a normal oven)

Grease and line either two 8inch round tins or one 15x8inch rectangular tin

Melt the chocolate either in a bain marie or in the microwave if you can guarantee you’re not going to burn it. Stir in 50ml milk and then set aside to cool

In a bowl, mix together the butter, oil, yogurt and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the vanilla and eggs and beat well (don’t worry if the mixture separates at this stage)

As best you can, divide the batters into equal halves. For the vanilla batter, fold in one lot of the ground almonds and baking powder along with one lot of the flour.  Stir in the remaining 50ml of milk to bring the batter to quite a runny consistency (this makes it easier to pipe or spread if you’re spooning)

For the chocolate batter, fold in the second lot of ground almonds and baking powder. Measure out the second lot of flour and subtract one tbsp of it for a tbsp of cocoa powder. Fold this into the batter

Put each batter into a piping bag and pipe round the edge of whatever style tin you have chosen with the vanilla batter. Next pipe a ring of chocolate batter, followed by another ring of vanilla. Continue alternating batters until the tins are full.

Bake for about 25 minutes until the cake springs back when touched and is shrinking away from the edges of the tin slightly.