The 81st recipe I made from The Modern Baker by Nick Malgieri, was the one for Rum-Scented Marble Cake, on page 228.
Yesterday some of the members from the Modern Baker group were tweeting and making a plan for baking something, this was my choice, Margaret agreed, and it turned out that Phyl was already in the process of gathering ingredients to make this recipe as well, so we had a spontaneous Twitterbake, always fun to bake the same thing together comparing notes along the way. This cake is definitely worth making...delicious and pretty. (We are not publishing recipes from the book, so if you like what you see, buy the book and bake along with or without us. That said, you can also find Nick's recipe at Epicurious online here.)
The ingredient list for the cake: flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, butter, eggs, rum, milk, baking soda, bittersweet chocolate. and some fine dry breadcrumbs.
All the ingredients are ones you probably have on hand, so there isn't anything really new there. The mixing takes a few bowls by the time you make the batter, divide it, mix in the chocolate which you melted in another bowl, and then pour it all into the baking pan, but it's all a simple step-by-step procedure outlined nicely in the book. The only technique new to me was coating the bundt pan with butter, fine dry bread crumbs, and then cooking spray...I had never done that before and it was interesting, could not detect the breadcrumbs in the final outcome and it did slide right out of the pan easily with no fuss.
I made a half-size version in my 6 cup bundt pan, using half the ingredients. One of my favorite things about making marbled anything is that you never know what it is going to look like on the inside until you slice into it and get a view. Always seems like a bit of artwork going on in there to me, always fun to see. We all made the same recipe, yet each of us has a totally different look to the inside...rather exciting to see what everyone gets for results that way. (It doesn't take much to entertain me, obviously.)
The cake is wonderful alone, you really don't need to frost or glaze it, as it is moist and flavorful as is, the rum gives just a little depth of flavor that makes it shine...definitely a repeat. This would be a great cake to take as a hostess gift or to a pitch-in.
If you would like to bake along or be a part of the Modern Baker group, you will find all that, plus a tab to link to the blogs posting, with the blogroll here.