Tuesdays With Dorie: Mocha-Walnut Marbled Bundt Cake

This weeks Tuesdays with Dorie was chosen by, “Drumroll please.”

:me banging on my desk:

Erin from When in Doubt…Leave it at 350.

Wait, that is me 🙂  Okay, so if you didn’t know before my name is Erin and I post as pastrybrush.  Now that the introduction is finished, we can get to the good stuff.

I choose Dorie’s Mocha-Walnut Marbled Bundt Cake, which is located on pages 180-181 in Baking: From My Home to Yours. Okay, the number one reason I picked this is that Mike recently bought me a new bundt pan for my birthday since we kept having mishaps with the old bundt pan.  By old bundt pan, I mean old.  It use to belong to his grandma, so it has seen better days and I am pretty certain it might be older than me 🙂  Reason number two, the picture of this bundt as been attracting me to it for 2 years and ended up on my, “I really need to make this” list.

Okay, lets get to the good stuff.  This baked up perfectly, however, I tried to do the gingko pattern that Dorie presented in the picture but no dice.  But like I told Mike, the cake has a tunnel of chocolate and who doesn’t like that.  I decided to glaze the cake with a chocolate icing and a vanilla icing; I thought that the cake needed some contrast for the pictures.  The vanilla icing is straight up what I did for the coconut tea cake last week with a drop of vanilla extract.  Now, the chocolate icing I want to say has 1.5 tbsp cocoa powder, 1/2 powdered sugar, 1/4 tsp chocolate extract (for extra chocolaty flavor), and 1-2 tbsp of coffee.  I am bad at measuring things out, so if it gets too runny add more powdered sugar if too thick add more coffee or milk.

FLAVOR!!!!!

WOW, the vanilla part of the cake was…I don’t know how to describe it.  It is like a dense vanilla pound cake with that nice hint of walnut.  Now the chocolate part was rich, a little bit more moist than the vanilla, and just straight up perfect.  Together the flavors were a dream.  Now, if you want to kick the cake into overdrive a glass of milk or a huge scoop of ice cream on top is amazing 🙂

I am happy that I picked this recipe, and I want to thank everyone that baked with me last week and this week.

Mocha-Walnut Marbled Bundt Cake

Source: Baking From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan

Essentially a walnut cake this is part vanilla and part mocha (both good go-with-walnut flavors), this is a beautiful, particularly if you pour in all the white batter, cover it with the dark batter and marble it minimally, so that you end up with a chocolate gingko leaf pattern in the center.

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup finely ground walnuts

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

2 sticks plus 2 tbsp (9 oz) unsalted butter, at room temperature

3 oz bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped

1/4 cup coffee, hot or cold

1 tsp finely ground instant coffee or instant espresso powder

1 3/4 cups sugar

4 large eggs, preferably at room temperature

2 tsp pure vanilla extract

1 cup whole milk, at room temperature

GETTING READY: Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  Butter a 9- to 10-inch (12-cup) Bundt pan, dust the inside with flour and tap out the excess.  (If you’ve got a silicone Bundt pan, there’s no need to butter or flour it.)  Don’t place the pan on a baking sheet – you want the oven’s heat to circulate through the Bundt’s inner tube.

Whisk together the flour, ground walnuts, baking powder, and salt.

Set a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of gently simmering water.  Put 2 tbsp of the butter, cut into 4 pieces, into the bowl, along with the chocolate, coffee and instant coffee.  Heat the mixture, stirring often, until the butter and chocolate are melted and everything is smooth and creamy – keep the heat low so that the butter and chocolate don’t separate.  Remove the bowl from the heat.

Working with a stand mixer, preferably with a paddle attachment or with a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat the remaining 2 sticks of butter and the sugar at medium speed for about 3 minutes – you’ll have a thick paste; this won’t be light and fluffy.  Beat in the eggs one by one, beating well after each addition.  The mixture should look smooth and satiny.  Beat in the vanilla extract.  Reduce the mixer speed to low and add the dry ingredients and the milk alternately, adding the dry mixture in 3 portions and the milk in 2 (begin and end with the dry ingredients).

Scrape a little less than half of the batter into the bowl with the melted chocolate and, using a rubber spatula, stir to blend thoroughly.

If you want to go for the gingko pattern, scrape all of the white batter into the pan and top with the chocolate.  If you want a more marbled pattern, alternate spoonfuls of light and dark batter in the pan.  When all the batter is in the pan, swirl a table knife sparingly through the batters to marble them.

Bake for 65 to 70 minutes, or until a thin knife inserted deep into the center of the cake comes out clean.  Transfer the Bundt pan to a rack and let cool for 10 minutes before unmolding, then cool the cake completely on the rack.