Low Fat Chocolate Marble Loaf Cake

I am big fan of starbuck's marble pound cake. So I hunted for the recipe and luckily found it on Starbuck's website. But alas it had 10 eggs and so much butter that I dropped the idea of making it at home and kept indulging once in a while at Starbuck's only. But marble cake is one thing that I always wanted to bake at least once. So another search and I found a recipe in Alice Medrich's Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts. Cake turned out very good..crumbly but moist. My friends liked it a lot and this post is for them.

Though above picture doesn't show much swirls because that was the first time I was doing it but later I got much better results (picture below). First time I did not use bread knife and that makes the difference. Recipe mentions it to be baked in 8 -10 cup tube pan but not having one I baked it in 9 in by 5 in loaf pan.

Chocolate Marble Cake (from Alice Medrich's Chocolate and the Art of Low Fat Desserts)

2 Cups cake flour
1 tsp Baking powder
1/2 tsp Baking soda
1/2 tsp Salt
1 tsp Instant espresso or Coffee powder
1/3 cup Unsweetened Dutch process cocoa
1 1/3 cups Sugar
6 tbsp Unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 whole egg
1 egg white
1 cup Nonfat plain yogurt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Have all ingredients at room temp. Preheat oven to 350 degrees with rack in the lower third of the oven. Spray 8-10 cup tube pan or 9 by 5 loaf pan with cooking spray.

Use a whisk to combine four, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Sift together. Set aside.

In a small bowl combine the espresso powder, cocoa and 1/3 cup of the sugar with 1/4 cup of water. Whisk until smooth. Set aside.

In another small bowl, whisk whole egg with egg white. Set aside.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter and remaining 1 cup of sugar until light, about 3 minutes. Gradually add eggs about 1 Tbsp at a time beating constantly for about 2 minutes. Beat in 2 tsp vanilla extract.

Add third of the flour mixture to the butter mixture. Then beat in half of the yogurt at low speed. Keep alternating flour and yogurt and mixing at low speed until just combined.

Measure out 1 1/2 cups of the yogurt batter and stir into the cocoa mixture.

Use a large spoon to fill the bottom of the pan with about three quarters of the white batter placed in dollops. Cover the white batter with dollops of chocolate batter. Top the chocolate batter with small dollops of white batter spaced so that the chocolate batter shows through. Use a bread knife to marble the batters together with a circular or zigzag motion; be careful not to blend them too much. Bake for 40 -50 minutes or until the cake starts to pull away from the sides of the pan and a toothpick inserted in comes out clean. With 9 by 5 loaf pan it took me 45 minutes.

Cool for 10-15 minutes on a rack. Unmold the cake. Cool completely before serving or storing.