Birthday cake query leads to marble memories

Susan Chase e-mailed me in early July asking: “I am trying to locate a recipe for a cake a friend made for birthdays when I was a little girl. The cake was called ‘Oogle’ (rhymes with Google) Cake and was a combination of chocolate and white or yellow, as I remember. I have not been able to locate anything like this. Thanks for your help.”

Well, thanks for Adrienne Durkee’s help! Adrienne lives just down the road from me and she sent along a nice marble cake recipe because I speculated a couple weeks ago that the cake (which I Googled, by the way, and found nothing named “oogle”) might have been a marble cake.

I haven’t had a marble cake for years and this query of Susan’s got me thinking about them. Some older versions of marble cake, ones dating to the early 1900s, called for molasses instead of chocolate to make the dark portion but all the marble cakes I remember from my girlhood were chocolate and vanilla. I don’t know if I just imagined it or not, but it seems my mom, who nearly never baked a cake from scratch, may have used a boxed mix with a little package of chocolate in it that was added to a portion of the batter.

Adrienne added a note that the cake made a nice birthday cake and that sometimes she bakes it in a bundt pan. I baked it in a tube pan. I love orange and chocolate together, but if you don’t, you can use vanilla or rum extract instead.

Send queries or answers to Sandy Oliver, 1061 Main Road, Islesboro 04848. E-mail: tastebuds@prexar.

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Deluxe Marble Cake

2 squares unsweetened

chocolate

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup water

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup butter

1 cup sugar

3 eggs

3/4 cups evaporated milk

1 teaspoon orange extract

Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour a tube or bundt pan.

In a small saucepan melt the chocolate with the 1/4 cup sugar and water over a low heat. Stir in the vanilla. Set it aside to cool.

Sift together all the dry ingredients except sugar. Cream the butter and 1 cup sugar until it is fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. Then beat in the flour mixture alternately with the evaporated milk. Add the orange extract.

In another bowl, combine 11/2 cups of batter with the chocolate mixture.

Drop the chocolate and yellow batters alternately in the pan, and run a knife through the batter a few times to marbleize it. Bake 35-40 minutes or until a tester inserted comes out clean.