Recipe for my mom’s marble cake in Hebrew so translation below. Made this for the borotweetup on Friday.

Marble Cake

Ingredients

7 eggs separated
1 ½ cups of sugar
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
¾ cup orange juice
1/6 cup oil
1 tbsp vanilla sugar
—
2 tbsp cocoa powder
2 tsp instant coffee
1 tbsp vanilla sugar

1. Beat the egg whites until stiff, add sugar, add yolks at medium speed
2. then add flour, baking powder, juice and oil
3. grease up a rectangular pan with oil (I use a large rectangular glass pyrex dish)
4. pour in 3/4 of the mixture
5. to the remaining 1/4 of the mixture in the bowl add the cocoa, coffee and vanilla sugar mix well
6. then add into the mixture already in the dish, use a fork to make the marble swirls.
7. Preheat the oven to 350/190. Bake for 40-45 minutes until a toothpick or fork can be inserted into the middle and come out clean.

Tips:

My mom listed vanilla sugar twice when writing out the recipe, once in the first mixture and then again in the chocolate mixture. I have made it with it in both, in just one and without.

If you don’t leave enough batter in the bowl the chocolate becomes denser/heavier and may sink to the bottom so you have a layer of chocolate at the bottom.

If you’re baking powder is not fresh you may end up with a flatter cake.

It’s an easy cake to make and it will taste good no matter what you do to it.

The batter is yummy too if you end up with some left in the bowl * innocent whistle *

The addition to the borotweetup cake was chocolate buttercream frosting and m+ms.

The chocolate buttercream frosting recipe I use is from cooks.com.

Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

Ingredients

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Baked using this recipe.

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Just did Pilates for the second time was really feeling it in my abs and legs…off to bake a chocolate buttercream frosted marble cake for Children in Need fundraiser at work.

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Did pilates for the first time today – it felt really good to do the stretching since I sit in front of a computer all day – here’s hoping I feel the same way tomorrow. Lights in the class were dimmed and there was a bit of a danger of me falling asleep during the relaxed bits. It is really sad how little strength I have in my midsection!

As part of this getting fit stuff we are also cooking more. This week pulled a few recipes out of the South Beach Diet Cookbook.

Last night we had:
Grilled Tuna with Teriyaki Glaze and Sesame Snow Pea and Asparagus Salad

Today we had:

Baked Portobello Caps with Melted Goat’s Cheese with South Beach Tomato Sauce

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Had a day off of work today.  Took the train to Sunderland to meet Richard. We started off going to Sunderland library home of the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art. There were a couple of exhibitions on. Giuseppe Davies: Vie is an interactive installation on until the 3rd of April.  It is a screen that responds to touch with lights and sound. It’s very pretty.  The larger exhibition on is  Think  Tank: A marketplace of ideas ending 13th of Feb so we are lucky we caught it. A bunch of ideas to reflect and improve society…Richard liked the We Not Me poster.  I liked the Institute of Economic Affairs map, simple, pretty and interesting – reminiscent of the Information Aesthetics Blog.

Then we went to Angelo’s Ristorante for excellent Italian food which  Richard got to order with a silly Italian accent – good fun.  For appetizers we had Formaggio di Capra e Rosti di Patate Croccante and Camembert. The main event was Ravioli alla Pizzaiola and Tagliatelle con Vedura e Zafferano.

For desert we went to Stardust which has a cute and crafty gift shop downstairs and a pretty cafe upstairs. Picked up the ring at left from the gift shop. Under £4 and a bit of fun. Upstairs, it’s a shame there weren’t more people there – the couches are the kind you sink into and the coffee and lemon cake were yummy. It seems like a perfect spot for students to camp out in with laptops and to just hang out.

I then attempted to recreate the artwork on the wall of Stardust, a photograph of a sculpture just outside.  It is a 2008 sculpture called Seachange by Laura Johnston.  It is meant to recall the hull of a ship and the shipbuilding heritage of the area as it transforms into something new. [Part of the Sunderland City Centre Public Art Trail]

Unfortunately it was raining so we didn’t want to spend too much time attempting to get the shot. You can see my few attempts on flickr.

I got distracted from the original mission of recreating the photo in the cafe because I loved the trees being reflected in the steel:

Seachange sculpture in Sunderland

To get out of the rain we headed into Primark and picked up some cheap and cheerful shiny, pretty things – a sparkly bracelet for £2 and some pillar candles for £1.75 each. The little charge you get from picking something up for £2 and £10 is really the same and lasts about the same amount of time (and £100 doesn’t really last ten times as long) – it’s a good thing to remember. We then stopped off at Richard’s to pick up the cute and stinky Florence and set off for Hartlepool.

I am a terrible navigator. Hopefully this will change when I learn how to drive. After a number of phone calls to Kev to set us back in the right direction we had a nice relaxed evening with some gewurztraminer from Chile via Morrisons and a quick sweet and sour chickeny bits with rice dish a la Kev.

Mostly it’s just the two of us but it was nice to have company too.  It’s easy to forget when you get into you routine.

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