Tiger Cake

My craving-du-jour is pound cake. I didn’t want plain because it’s too plain, and I didn’t want chocolate because it’s overpowering…so I thought I’d try this one, which has a little of both. The recipe is from "Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate" by Alice Medrich, who founded "Cocolat" in Berkeley many years ago. This book, by the way, was the IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals) Cookbook of the Year for 2004. The brownie recipes in this book are killer.

There’s no butter in the cake, it has olive oil. I put half Smart Balance oil (which has olive oil) and half EVOO. The "stripes" are created by layering three layers each of plain and chocolate batter. Stirring isn’t necessary, somehow the batters swirl by themselves. From the looks of it, the chocolate must float to the top. Don thought the swirl on the left side of the cake looked like a swan.

Yum…this was just what I wanted. The cookbook says it should be even better tomorrow, and suggests toasting it. Somewhere else I read about buttering both sides of a piece of pound cake, grilling it like you would a grilled cheese sandwich, then putting ice cream on top. That sounds insane. When it starts to get stale I’ll try that.

We finished the last of the leftovers tonight. I need to go grocery shopping and I’m going to try to find something Rachael to cook this week. I saw she has two cookbooks coming out, one in April and one in November. She’s a busy girl!