Most of my recipes are old, not ancient but when I thought about the age of my recipes and came to the conclusion, that even if I would have created those recipes when I was a teenager, they would be really old. Many of those cakes are with me for my entire life and uncountable numbers of memories relate to them. Today I would like to tell you about a cake that is very famous around the world and that I wanted badly to learn how to bake but I did not even like it that much.

The recipe Is very well known in Germany and basically every family has their own variation of it. It is kind of like it is with Pizza. Pizzas have a crust, tomato sauce, cheese, and other additional toppings, but not every type of Pizza is liked by everybody. Cakes are the same, just because they have the same name does not mean that they are assembled and prepared the same way. The cake I would like to tell you about today was not one I loved to eat when I was young, it was not outstandingly delicious, it was just very common and vastly available. My Oma Maria would bake it on Saturdays very frequently so she and her husband would have a sweet treat on Saturday’s and Sunday afternoons, and maybe a slice for breakfast on Monday. At a child’s birthday, the cake would be decorated with a chocolate glaze and milk chocolate m&m’s. Before m&m’s became a thing in Europe, the colorful chocolate lenses had been from Nestle and their name was Smarties. Smarties decoration on your Birthday cake was a Preschool, Kindergarten, and Elementary School life goal and it would make you the winner for the day.

Germans know by now about which cake I write, Marmorkuchen. Literally translated into English, its US name would be Marble Cake, but what I mostly see over here is the name marble loaf. I get it since I have lived here for a while now. This name is given to it because the batter is commonly baked in a loaf pan, but since my treats are mostly shaped in Gugelhupf style I prefer the name Mable Cake. I can see how people here can struggle with this, cakes here have frosting and layers, but I have the exact same struggle with calling it a loaf. In Germany, loaves are bread, and even though I learned here in the US that bread can be sweet, like banana bread, bread in my mind is never sweet. I only know one German item called bread that is slightly sugared, it is called Raisin bread, it is like a brioche loaf with raisins, so it is actually not really sweet, but that sweet, was the sweetest that a bread can get when I grew up.

If you want to keep a recipe from a family member alive, go to the person and watch them prep it. The secret is usually not the list with ingredients.

I already told you that my Oma Maria would bake Marble cake a lot, basically every week. It was the favorite treat for my Opa. They called it cake for good health (Gesundheitskuchen). A quick online search did not bring up other marble cake recipes under that name but many other recipes for similar loaf or Gugelhupf cakes in numerous variations all called Gesundheitskuchen. My mother rarely baked it, and I had no special connection to it until I was introduced to the family of my husband. My husband’s Oma Ursel used to make, according to her entire family, THE BEST marble cake of all. Other families say the exact same thing about theirs though. I was not very impressed when I tried it for the first time, I thought, well, it is just marble cake, what is the big deal of that family around it? Some family celebrations later I learned that there must be a secret Oma Ursel is not telling. Many family members tried to bake it after Oma’s exact recipe, but it never turned out like her’s. They also mentioned the fear that Oma Ursel might take the secret to the grave one day. After some years I started to appreciate the marble cake too and was wondering about the secret as well. Especially, because I enjoyed baking so much, I wondered if I could apply the secret to other cakes too. I started wondering what she was doing. It was not the fact that she covered her marble cake on all sides with chocolate, she also did not add a spoon of vinegar, like some experienced bakers would do, and I started wanting to know.

One day I was challenged by my husband, back then boyfriend, and he told me, that he would marry me on the spot if I could replicate the marble cake from his Oma Ursel. Well, what should I say, we got married and we still are. I asked Oma Ursel eventually if I could watch her bake it and write down the recipe while being with her. This is something I can only recommend to anyone who would like to preserve an old family recipe. Go and watch the person do it! The secret was not a special ingredient, she had kept from everybody, no it was the amount Oma Ursel used of one special ingredient. She used to rub lard into the baking pan to get the cake out more easily after baking, but she did not just coat the pan in a thin layer. Before you judge her cooking to be unhealthy, I must mention that she survived WWII and that generation enjoyed cooking very rich food. Hence, she did not really keep this trick a secret but the path to a marble cake as delicious and rich as the one from Oma Ursel would cost a calorie aware person a lot of willpower. The toll you had to pay was to apply the same amount of lard to the pan as Oma did and you only could know this once you watched her doing it. When she gave out her recipe, she made no secret of the fact that she used lard to grease the pan. Whoever used those directions would only cover the surface as thin as possible before filling in the batter, but that wouldn’t do the trick for getting the moist texture. Watching her also explained to me why she would always cover the cake in chocolate after baking, the chocolate is needed to cover up the lard taste. I use goose lard to prep the pan for the marble cake on my menu, I cover the cake in chocolate to honor our family history, and compared with other Gugelhupf cakes on my menu, the marble cake is on the richer side, but usually I don’t use Oma’s measurements for the pan prep nowadays. It is still delicious enough, and until you try it you will have to rely on my word.

I don’t say that my marble cake is the best of all, but it certainly is liked by many people. After I mastered marble cake baking a la Oma Ursel, it became a stable at all family gatherings. In my family and in my husband’s family after Oma Ursel died unexpectedly early without being sick.

“It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary.”

– Paulo Coelho

I wondered how long the recipe was in the family but my mother in law was not able to tell if Oma Ursel learned the recipe from her mother or grandmother, and I decided that the age of that recipe is sort of irrelevant because it was not possible to bake it this certain way in generations before her, while people had been poor, so it must be a variation from Oma Ursel herself. When I looked online for marble cake, I could not come up with an interesting story to add to my personal, but profound history or not, it is a very well-known cake even here in the US and many people love it for its simple combination of vanilla and chocolate.