Marble Loaf Cake Recipe – Sally’s Baking Addiction

Today we’re relying on our loaf pan, the magical vehicle that supplies us with banana bread, loaf pan cheesecake, and even blueberry lemon icebox cake.

Here’s Why You Will Love This Cake:

• Tastes rich and moist with prominent vanilla & chocolate flavors.
• It’s just as buttery as pound cake, but with a lighter crumb.
• The 2 cake flavors come from 1 basic batter.
• Assembly is as easy as spooning batter into a loaf pan and swirling with a knife.
• Fuss-free decorating– all the beauty is on the inside!

If you love homemade cake, but don’t need a towering giant with gobs of sweet frosting, this easy yet impressive dessert is for you. ????

Key Ingredients You Need for Marble Loaf Cake:

Adapted from reader-loved chocolate chip loaf cake, this marble loaf cake comes together with basic baking ingredients. You need all of the above plus flour, baking powder, and salt. Let me explain some of the most important:

1. Creamed Butter & Sugar: Like most cake recipes, the wet ingredients start with room temperature butter and granulated sugar to create a fluffy creamed base. Unlike most cake recipes, we’ll also add some oil.
2. Oil: Oil is a cake’s best friend because it adds exceptional moisture. The test cake without oil was a bit dry. Test cake #2 replaced some butter with vegetable oil and the cake tasted moister and richer. Most notably, however, tasters and I felt the chocolate flavor was more prominent in the loaf made with oil.
3. Sour Cream & Whole Milk: Both help create a tender, cake-like crumb.
4. Cocoa Powder: You need cocoa powder to make your chocolate batter. Since we use baking powder in this cake recipe, you can use either dutch-process or natural cocoa powder.
5. Espresso Powder: As you’ll notice in chocolate cake and chocolate chess pie, espresso powder kicks up chocolate’s flavor. This cake does NOT taste like coffee, rather, it deepens the chocolate.

Success Tip: Use Room Temperature Ingredients

Use Room Temperature Ingredients: All refrigerated items should be at room temperature so the cake batter mixes together easily and evenly. Simply put, cold ingredients won’t properly combine to produce a smooth cake crumb. The batter will have lumps, as pictured below, but if you use cold ingredients, expect a lot of lumps that won’t bake properly.

After you prepare the vanilla batter, transfer some to another bowl and mix in your cocoa powder, more milk, and the espresso powder:

Here’s Exactly How to Swirl The Batters Together

1. Spread a thin layer of the plain vanilla batter on the bottom.
2. Layer spoonfuls of each batter on top. Cover bottom vanilla layer with a few spoonfuls of the chocolate batter, then a few spoonfuls of the vanilla batter, then more chocolate batter, then more vanilla batter, and so on until all of the cake batter is used.
3. Gently shimmy the pan to level out the batters.
4. Using a knife, make rounded horizontal zig-zags from one side of the pan to the other and then make rounded vertical zig-zags from the top to the bottom.

2 Ingredient Chocolate Ganache Topping

To top the cake, let’s turn to the wonderful dessert concoction known as ganache. Chocolate ganache is typically made with 1:1 semi-sweet chocolate and heavy cream or heavy whipping cream, but for this cake I wanted a thicker-style ganache so I reduced the amount of cream. Since there’s less liquid, it’s best to melt these two ingredients together rather than pour warm cream over the chocolate.

I used milk chocolate in the pictured cake and if you’re using that as well, please see my recipe note because you need even less heavy cream.

Let the ganache thicken for 20-30 minutes and then drape your cake. It’s glorious!

Marble loaf cake is built-in beauty with basically zero decoration. We can all appreciate that!

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