Choc mint marble cake

I may have got a bit too interested in baking now. Throughout a stressful day this week I ended up half fantasising half planning my latest cakes. It felt therapeutic and I am frankly beginning to find this alarming.

However, more people found my latest bake alarming. I made chocolate and mint marble cupcakes.

Although it sounds ambitious it is in fact relatively simple, just requires having a lot of bowls to hand.

You need to half the mixture to make a normal Victoria sponge, so that you can flavour the two sets of cake batter differently.

So cream together 65g of sugar and 65g of butter. Next add 65g worth of flour and a teaspoon of baking powder. Fold this in carefully until all the lumps have gone.

Then repeat this process again so you have two bowls of normal cake batter. The only difference I made was for the cake mix that was going to be flavoured with cocoa I used dark brown sugar so that it tasted more treacle like.

So for the chocolate cake mix add in about a tablespoon of cocoa powder. Mix this in until you have a lovely rich brown looking cake mix.

For the mint half of the cake I attempted to make it look green. I added in about 4 teaspoons of green food colouring which made the mix look green but when baked it just looked like normal cake. This was disappointing but I suppose I should just look a bit more into the best kind of food colouring for cakes etc.

To make it minty I added in about 4 teaspoons of peppermint flavouring, and mix it in. This is thing to gauge for yourself based on how much you like mint, but this amount did not end up being too overpowering in the end.

Now for the fun part. Set out 12 cupcake cases in a cake tray. Go round each of the cases putting in one large tablespoon of one of the cake mixes into each case. Then top of the cases with a tablespoon of the remaining cake mix. I went chocolate first and then mint second.

Put them into an oven at gas mark 5 for about 20 minutes and then you have mint choc marble cakes.

When I told some people about it they were a bit disturbed because mint should either be hard or chewy and not 'cakey'. However, the people who have eaten the cakes, ie me and my boyfriend, have liked them.

Also you don't have to stick to choc and mint. The traditionally flavourings of a marble cake are chocolate and vanilla, but as long as the flavours work together then pretty much anything could work. And the marble effect is fun to make.