 Welcome back you guys! Today I'm sharing a really wonderful recipe for a classic marble layer cake. So it combines two of my favorite recipes, my classic vanilla layer cake recipe and my chocolate layer cake recipe into one beautiful masterpiece. So it all comes together in one bowl and the ingredients are super straightforward. I have some flour, sugar, buttermilk, egg whites, course some cocoa and some sweet and baking cocoa, salt, baking powder, vanilla and my favorite ingredient, some unsalted butter. So I'm going to walk you through all the steps on exactly how I make the batter and swirl it together to create our beautiful cake layers. So I'm starting off with three and a quarter cups of just all-purpose flour. It doesn't have any leavening agents in it. It's not self-drying, just good old fashioned all-purpose flour. I'm going to add all of my dry ingredients into my sand mixer here. So also adding three cups of granulated sugar, two and a half teaspoons of baking powder, also one teaspoon of salt. So I'm going to slowly mix these together with some gentle pulses. And here I'm using a paddle mixer, but you could definitely use a regular whisk attachment if you prefer that. It all just depends on your preference. Both will work and will make great batter. So next I'm going to add my butter straight into my dry ingredients. And I cut it up into smaller pieces just to help it incorporate more easily. So in total I'm adding one cup of butter, but I'm going to add one stick at a time, which is just a half a cup. So I'm going to give this some gentle pulses until it looks like it's been thoroughly worked into the dry ingredients. Next I'm adding in my other half cup of butter. And this process of adding your butter into all of your dry ingredients instead of whipping it together with gesture sugar is called reverse crumming. And I really love the texture that it creates and cakes. So just giving this a few more gentle pulses to get all of that butter worked into the dry ingredients. So as you guys can see it has a little bit of a crummy texture to it. It looks almost like sand and that's the consistency that you're after. So once your butter has reached that stage, it's time to add in some of our wet ingredients. So I like to start by adding my egg whites first. And this is just one cup of pasturized egg whites. It's also the equivalent of just seven regular egg whites. I prefer to use egg whites from the carton just because they're much easier to work with and that way I don't have to waste the egg yolks. So our batter is starting to come together and next I'm going to add in my buttermilk. So I like to add this in two parts just so that it doesn't splash too much. If you don't have buttermilk you could always use whole milk or you could add a little bit of lemon juice or vinegar to some regular milk to give it a little bit of tang. So we're just going to add in about half of the buttermilk. Give that a few gentle pulses. And then we'll pour in the other half. So this is the point where I like to give a quick scrape around the bowl just to make sure that everything is getting fully incorporated and making sure that I reach all the way down to the bottom to get everything mixed thoroughly. I also like to scrape off the attachment of my kitchen heat just to make sure that sometimes some dry ingredients can get kind of packed in there and that way you're sure that everything really is mixing together fully. Next I just have to add in my vanilla. So that's two teaspoons of vanilla. Give that a quick pulse and then our vanilla batter is ready to go. Alright so our vanilla cake batter looks super luscious and smooth. And now it's time to divide this in half and begin to make our chocolate cake batter. So if one batch of batter makes about 1,900 grams, half of that is going to be 950 grams. My bowl weighs 260 grams roughly. So I'm going to want this to reach a weight of 1,210 grams. So it's going to vary based on the bowl you're using but in general it's a good estimate for how much batter you need to divide it equally in half. Let's see if we can get this to that 1,200. That gets us over we're now at 1258 so if that happens no worries just scoop a little bit back into your mixing bowl. So now that we've set aside half of our vanilla cake batter we're going to mix in some additional ingredients into the other half to turn it into chocolate cake batter. So to do this we're going to be adding a bit of baking cocoa. Some additional buttermilk, egg whites and sugar, a little bit of salt and a tiny bit more baking powder. And the reason that we're doing this is because by adding in some additional baking cocoa, it acts almost the same as flour and in my normal chocolate cake recipe I actually swap out some of the flour for baking cocoa. So with that in mind we want to just make sure that we don't make the batter too dense or too dry. So we're adding in some additional ingredients to help give it that amazing texture that our original vanilla cake batter has. That would also when it swirls together every bite of chocolate and vanilla is going to be equally delicious and you won't be sad that the chocolate cake is a bit drier or denser or anything like that. So I'm going to zoom in show you exactly how I add in these ingredients and then we'll get to swirling the cake batters together. I'm going to start off by adding in my baking cocoa. So if you wanted to you could sift your baking cocoa but by adding it first and mixing in the other ingredients I've found that it usually incorporates just fine. If you have a problem with having bits of cocoa that haven't been mixed in you can definitely sift this before you add it into your cake batter. So now that our cocoa is and I'm also going to add in our extra granulated sugar and I'm going to give that a quick mix before we add in our wet ingredients. Next I'm going to add in my additional egg whites and my buttermilk. I'm going to scrape down the sides quickly again and then I'll add in my additional baking powder and my salts. And I don't add in any additional vanilla just because the cocoa is already going to give the cake batter a great taste. Alright you guys and just like that our chocolate cake batter is ready to go as well. So this next step is optional but to really amp up this marble chocolate cake recipe I'm going to add about 170 grams of chocolate chips and these are mini chocolate chips. I like using them just because they melt a little bit faster. So I'm going to add them into a bowl and I'm also going to add a half a stick or a quarter of a cup of unsalted butter. And then the last ingredient is a quarter of a cup of heavy cream. So I'm going to pop this into the microwave and heat it in 30 second intervals until the chocolate is fully melted and everything is mixed together. So I'm stirring between each 30 second interval in the microwave and I'm just going to give it a quick stir to get some of that melted chocolate worked around before I pop it into the microwave again. So I heated this for two 30 second intervals. I let it sit for about one minute just to let some of the heat from the mixture and from the bowl get any of those last few bits of chocolate and butter that were not melted yet. And now you can see it's silky smooth. So it's still a little bit warm. I'm going to set it aside and let it thicken up just a bit before I start marbling it into my cake batter. So I like to spray my pan with non-stick cooking spray and also line it with parchment rounds to make sure that my cake layers pop out nice and easy after they're done baking. I'm going to start off by just taking spoonfuls of batter and dropping them into the pan. I'm going to alternate this with my chocolate cake batter. So I want my pans to be filled just about just under an inch full of batter. So now I'm adding in our chocolate mixture just to add an extra special touch to these cake layers. And now comes the fun part. Using a small offset spatula or a butter knife, I'm just going to drag it through the batter to make both horizontal and vertical lines. You want to make sure the knife is touching all the way to the bottom of the cake pan. So it's truly swirling everything together. And there you have it. So to prep these cake layers, I'm going to use a small offset spatula and just run it around the edge of the pan to help separate the cake layers to allow them to pop out cleanly. I'm also going to use a slightly smaller pan. This is a seven inch pan. And I'm just going to press it on top of the cake layers. And this seems a little strange, but I'm not going to be leveling these cake layers because I don't want to cut off any of that beautiful chocolate that's been marbled into our layers. So I'm just going to carefully press down with my hand to get them a little bit more level.