Pellegrino Marble Cake

Hmmm Pellegrino???? In a cake???? Hell yeah !!!! This cake is sooooo heavenly!!! It's moist, light and very delicate. While I was tasting it, the only sound that I made was "mmmmmmm" again and again :) And it is very easy to make..

I found the original recipe from an old cookbook of Emine Beder (BTW,she is the maestro of cooking in Turkey) . If I remember it correctly, her book was one of the very first cookbooks that I purchased and I was about 18 years old. I immediately fell in love with the recipes in that book which I brought to US with me 4 years ago.

Again, I reduced the white sugar to 1 cup but added also brown sugar. To speak honestly, I had to do it because I was run out of regular granulated sugar :)) However, the result was perfect because brown sugar made the outer crust little bit chewy. So that cake was moist and tender inside but crusty and chewy on the outside:)

Well, in honor of Emine Beder, here's the recipe which I  modified from the original one..

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup mineral water ( I used Pellegrino)
• Zest of 1 lemon
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tbs baking powder
• 2 1/2 cups all purpose unbleached flour
• 1/3 cup cocoa powder

1. Preheat oven to 380 F. Butter the baking pan,dust with flour,tapping out the excess.
2. Beat the eggs with sugar about 2 min until it becomes foamy.
3. Add oil,mineral water ,lemon zest and vanilla extract,beat to combine.
4. Mix flour with baking powder in a separate bowl.
5. Add flour mixture to the liquid ingredients in three parts.Mix until just combined,not to overmix.
6. Divide the batter into three batches and set aside one of them. Mix cocoa powder with the reserved cake batter,stir until well combined.
7. First, put one vanilla batter in the baking pan. Then on top of it, add cocoa batter. Finally add the remaining vanilla batter. To create the marbling, run a table knife or a toothpick in the batter in a swirling motion.
8. Bake about 1 hour until the tr pan in a tester comes out clean. Transfer the pan to a rack to cool about 10 minutes. Turn out the cake from the pan and cool completely...