A day through my life...: Eggless Mango Marble Cake

Today is Twenty Eighth of the month and its time for my Potluck Party, Cyber Style, an event which is the brain child of Jagruti of J Cooking Odyssey. On tenth of every month, we post our recipes for the event and then we are assigned partners from the event. We then prepare our partner's recipe and post them on the twenty eighth of the month. This month I had posted the recipe of Kaju Katli and I was assigned Nayana Pikle as my partner and I get to prepare her Eggless Mango Chocolate Marble cake as today's recipe. I was very excited to find that I get to prepare a cake as part of the event. You may have noticed that I have very few cake recipes posted on the blog. My blog covers only the basic cake and Rava cake recipes. Do check them out. I used to bake a lot in the initial days of blogging but couldnt post the recipes due to lack of good pics and camera :( Again when I had a decent camera, I was struggling with a couple of health issues and consciously stayed away from baking for a while. Now my health has improved a bit and I have started preparing sweets and cakes again :) But still maintaining a control on them. So I dont think I may bake cake till any special occasion from now.

Coming back to the Eggless Mango Marble cake that Nayana had baked, I was very happy to see the zebra like pattern she had given to the cake. I was drooling over her mango marble cake seeing the astonishing yellow color the cake has :) Okay after drooling over the cake, I came back to the practicalities of making the cake. The recipe called for alphonso mangoes.. I had just bought a box full of alphonso mangoes when we had gone to an Indian market which is around 2 hrs away from our place in April and they had all got over... The near by Indian grocery store did not store alphonso mangoes and which ever they had were all shrunk and wasted and we didnt want to travel 2 hrs simply for buying the mangoes (My hubby would have thrown tantrums just for me suggesting it he he :P) We visit the nearby Indian stores once every two or three weeks. I had just visited the nearby Indian store the week before the potluck party and didnt want to wait two or three weeks to make the cake. I decide to try with the Mangoes available in the local stores. Ah they had Mexican mangoes which were not at all sweet and not even ripe properly and even though my cake looked beautiful, it was more chocolatey and no one could even guess that it contained mangoes!!!

Well, disappointed I decided to search other methods of getting the alphonso mangoes. My online blogger friends suggested using store brought alphonso mango pulp. I didnt fancy them much because they contain too much sugar content. But a visit to the near by Indian stores made me realize that it was the only option as those stores didnt have any alphonso mangoes. At this point, I was just glad to find the can of alphonso mango pulp there and didnt want to search further... And then excitedly I tried out the recipe.. This time it was better than the mexican mango fiasco :) And one could taste the mango flavor in it. The oven at my home have some temperature issues and I had to bake for a longer time. So the mango layer browned a bit. But other than that, every thing went off perfectly.. I am not much a fan of chocolatey flavor in cakes (Ya Weird I know ) but my hubby and neighbours loved the cake.. Do Check out the recipe. Served with lot of love for my dear hubby :)

Eggless Mango Chocolate Marble Cake:

Ingredients:

2 cups of All purpose Flour ( Just my luck, my APF got almost over and I had only 1 cup of APF left. So used remaining 1 cup of Wheat Flour, Didnt make any difference to the flavor of the cake )

1.5 Tsp Baking Powder

0.5 Tsp Baking Soda

3/4 cup Sugar ( Even though I used canned mango pulp which had some sugar content in it, I didnt reduce the sugar from the original recipe and the cake had just the right amount of sugar in it)

1 Tsp Vanilla Essence

5 Tbsp Oil

1/4 Cup Cocoa Powder (Used unsweetened version)

1 cup Alphonso Mango Pulp ( Used canned version)

1/4 cup Milk

2 Tbsp Curd or Yoghurt

Warm Water

Prepping:

Step 1: Dissolve the cocoa powder in 2 - 3 Tbsp Warm water. Keep aside.

Step 2: Dilute 2 Tbsp Curd in 2 Tbsp Water. Keep aside.

Step 3: Only If you are using fresh mangoes;

Peel the mangoes, cut them into cubes. Then blend in a mixer till smooth. Keep aside 1 cup mango pulp.

Step 4: Add the flour, baking soda and baking powder in a vessel. Mix well. Sieve the mixture twice. Keep aside.

Step 5: Preheat the oven to 180 degrees for 10 - 15 min.

Method of Preparing:

Step 1:

Add oil and sugar in the blender and blend till they are mixed well.

Step 2:

Add the milk, mango pulp, diluted curd mixture and vanilla essence to the oil - sugar mixture in the blender and blend till a smooth mixture is attained.

Step 3:

Now pour the mixture to a vessel and add the blended flour mixture a little at a time and mix well till all the flour is incorporated well into the mixture. Note the cake batter will be very thick at this stage.

Step 4:

Pour half the batter into another vessel.

Step 5:

Add the cocoa mixture to one of the vessels and mix well. Now the two batters are ready. One is the mango batter and the other with cocoa powder mixed forms the chocolate batter.

Step 6:

Line a 8 inch cake pan with parchment paper or aluminium foil. Grease it with butter.

Step 7:

Using a ladle, pour the mango batter in the center of the cake pan. Then on top of the mango batter pour the chocolate batter. Repeat alternatively till the batter is over.

Step 8:

Without tilting the pan, transfer to the oven and bake at 180 degrees for 35 - 40 min till a toothpick/Knife inserted into the cake comes out clean.

Switch off, let the cake cool for some time and then transfer into a plate. Cake just out of the oven looks as below.