Welcome to Baked, a new column in which Amrita Rawat will share her adventures in the kitchen as she explores our fair city. Born in India and a longtime resident of Atlanta, Rawat recently moved to St. Louis to attend graduate school at Washington University. After eating her way through places like Hong Kong, Paris, Budapest, Mumbai and Shangri-La, she discovered a love for baking and a knack for creating inventive and tasty recipes. You can follow her on her sweet journey every other Monday right here on SauceMagazine.com. With the sudden onset of summer, you’re likely to find me at The Zoo, wandering the grounds, snapping photos of cute animals doing their cute animal things. I especially love the zebras, calmly trotting around their pen with their gorgeous black and white stripes.
After a recent trip to the zoo, I was looking around for recipes and came across some beautiful zebra cakes. I loved the touch of whimsy in these cakes with their beautiful vanilla and deep chocolate wavy stripes baked right in. The recipe itself is very plain, consisting of a vanilla batter in which cocoa powder is incorporated into half of the batter. The cake is not very sweet but turns out quite moist thanks to the generous oil content. It would serve well as an accompaniment to tea or coffee, and a glaze could make it sweeter if you prefer. I, however, love the subtle role sweetness plays in this light cake.
I like trying simple, classic recipes and then putting a small twist on them. I can appreciate a plain vanilla cake but, if I have extracts on hand, I find it far too tempting to play with the flavors … so I do. For this cake, I added almond and coconut extracts, which yielded a nice pairing of flavors and complemented the vanilla and chocolate combination perfectly. The cake was soft and moist, with a delicious coconut aroma. It was also gone within the day, although I’ve heard that it keeps well in an airtight container.
Zebra cake is an instant crowd-pleaser and also just happens to be an incredibly easy recipe.
Almond-Coconut Zebra Cake Serves 10
Adapted by Amrita Rawat from a recipe originally published at kingarthurflour.com 4 large eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup milk (low fat is fine)
1 cup vegetable oil
½ tsp. vanilla extract
½ tsp. almond extract
½ tsp. coconut extract
2 cups all purpose flour
1 Tbsp. baking powder
Pinch salt
2 ½ Tbsp. cocoa powder
• Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
• Line a 9-inch round cake pan with a circle of parchment paper and lightly grease the bottom and sides of the pan.
• In a large bowl, mix together the eggs and sugar until the mixture is light and creamy and the sugar has mostly been dissolved. Stir in milk, vegetable oil and extracts. Set aside.
• In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder and salt. Pour into wet ingredients and whisk to combine.
• Measure out just over two cups of vanilla batter and place it back in the medium-sized bowl where the dry ingredients were.
• Sift cocoa powder over the bowl and whisk until fully incorporated. This will serve as your chocolate batter.
• Put 3 tablespoons of vanilla batter into the center of the pan and let it spread slightly on its own.
• Put 3 tablespoons of chocolate batter in the center of the vanilla batter. It will push out the other batter and, as it sits for a moment, will also spread itself.
• Alternating spoonfuls of the two batters, repeat the technique until all the batter has been used up.
• Bake for 38 to 42 minutes, or until the cake is light gold and a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.
• Let the cake cool in the pan for 10 to 15 minutes, then turn out the cake and remove the parchment paper.
• Turn out on to a wire rack and let cool before slicing.
— Photo by Amrita Rawat
This article appears in June 2011.