Beginning the month of February, I am starting a new series called SpotLightBlog. My bookmark folder is overflowing and I wanted to do some justice to the bookmarked recipes. My first idea was to try one recipe each week and post it subsequently. But choosing one recipe was not easy as I thought to be. Instead, I thought of selecting a blog and trying four recipes and post one every week. I felt that to be a better option and in a way I can show my appreciation to my fellow blogger too. So from this month onwards, one blog will be chosen as SpotLightBlog and I shall showcase once recipe per week and will be posting it every Monday. I had this project in mind for sometime now and wanted to start from January. But the month of January had something else in store fro me in the form of relatives, festivals etc. So it starts from February.
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The first blog I have chosen is my dear friend Shoba's Anubavathi, which has lot of traditional recipes and eggless bakes. Recipe for this week is a Zebra cake following Shoba's recipe. I know this is a signature cake of Shoba among her friends and she is quite an expert in baking this cake in various flavors. I didnot make any changes to the recipe. It came out very well. The cake was very spongy and moist and was a winner for an eggless cake. To make Zebra cake, any recipe can be followed. Is the pattern that matters. It comes in practise. First time when I made, the lines were very thin and hardly the pattern could be made out. The second time I made, the patterns were visible, though I felt I could improve better in terms of pattern, since taste wise, the cake was very good.
All Purpose Flour / Maida - 2cups
Baking Soda. - 1 tspn
Baking Powder -1 tspn
Oil - 1/2 cup
Sugar - 1 1/4 cup
Whole Milk - 1 3/4
Vanilla essence - 1 tspn
Cocoa Powder - 4 tblspn
In a bowl, mix the dry ingredients - Maida, Baking soda and baking power. Mix well.
In another bowl, mix oil and sugar. Wisk well to dissolve the sugar. Add milk and whisk everything together. Slowly, add the dry ingredients to the wet mix little by little. Mix well after each addition with out forming any lumps.
Remove half of the batter to another bowl. To one half add vanilla essence and to the other, add cocoa powder and mix well.
Take a greased and flour dusted pan. Take a ladle which can contain around 4 tblspn of the batter. Add a ladle of chocolate batter on to the centre of the pan. Next add a ladle of the vanilla batter onto the centre of the chocolate batter. Don't try to spread or shake the pan. The batter gets spread on its own. You keep adding both the batter alternatively until you finish all the batter.
The amount of batter added to form a ring is important to get nice and clear pattern. If too little batter is added the lines formed will be very thin and the patter doesn't show well.
Bake the cake in preaheated oven at 170 C for 35 minutes or it passes a toothpick test.
My eldest co-sister had sent me mini cake moulds and I wanted to use that too. So I made 3 mini cakes and used the rest of the batter for the bigger one.
The patterns have come out better in the mini cake mould. The amount of batter added for each ring was little more here.
