Inspiration can come from the strangest of places. In this instance, I was watching a video of soap making on YouTube. They made the soap in long bars with a repeating pattern on the top, then sliced it into the individual soaps. I thought to myself that perhaps this method might work with a loaf cake. It did!

This is my twist on a basic marble cake. We were off for a picnic with my daughters best friend for her birthday and I wanted to take a special cake along that was still easy to carry and slice. Once cut, its the inside of this cake that makes it such a showstopper, and the girls faces when we got it out, really made it worth the effort.

Ingredients:

For the cake:

8oz caster sugar

8oz dairy free margarine

4 hens eggs (or 3 duck eggs for a really creamy taste)

8oz self raising flour

1 tsp vanilla essence

3 different food colourings (I chose pink, purple and turquoise)

For the topping:

1 batch of vanilla flavoured buttercream (you can find a recipe here)

Sprinkles

Fondant Icing

Gold food lustre dust

Method:

For the cake:

Pre-heat the oven to 160°C

Grease a loaf shaped baking tin and line with greaseproof paper/ baking parchment.

Cream together the butter and sugar

Add the eggs one at a time and beat into the mixture. If your mixture starts to curdle just add a spoonful of the pre-measured flour.

Add the rest of the flour and mix until all the ingredients are combined and stir in the vanilla essence.

Separate the mixture into 4 bowls. Leave one bowl plain, then put the food colouring, one each, into the other three bowls so you end up with 4 different colours.

Use a teaspoon to put the coloured mixtures into the bottom of the loaf tin. Try not to put two of the same colour next to each other.

Once you have completed the bottom layer, run a skewer through the mix, to gently mix the colours into each other. Don’t over mix though. You want to see the individual colours in the finished cake.

Continue to the next layer and repeat the process.

Keep repeating the spooning and swirling until the loaf tin is full.

Bake in the oven for about 45mins. You will know that the cake is done when the top is firm and springy, the edges of the cake are starting to come away from the edge of the tin and a skewer put into the middle of the cake comes out clean. Cooking times may vary depending on the shape of your loaf tin, so keep an eye on it.

Once cooked, turn out onto a cooling rack and allow to cool completely.

For the decoration:

Make up a small batch of white fondant icing. I like to use the silver spoon fondant icing and follow the instructions. It makes fondant icing really easy.

Make small circles from the fondant, then pinch in at the bottom to form an ear shape. Paint the inside of the ear with the gold dust. Make 24 of these.

Make 2 small sausage shapes with the fondant icing. Twist these two shapes around each other to form the twist of the unicorns horn. Dust with the gold lustre. Make 12 of these.

Cover the top of the loaf cake with a thin layer of the dairy free vanilla butter cream.

Colour the rest of the buttercream with pink food colouring. Then use a star shaped piping nozzle to pipe a thick line of buttercream down the center of the cake.

Put in the twelve horns and twenty four ears on either side, the whole way along the cake. Finish off with some sprinkles.

When the cake is cut you will see the marbling inside and each slice will have its own unicorn horn and set of ears.

This was a really fun recipe to develop. I loved making this a unicorn cake but the theme doesn’t have to stop there. You can take this idea and make any theme of cake you like. For example, you could marble plain, black and orange cake and decorate with spiders for a spooky Halloween cake. The options are endless. Why not share your bakes and other ideas in the comments. I can’t wait to hear them.