Marble cake is great to bring out at parties. It looks spectacular when cut and doesn’t take much longer to make than a regular sponge cake.

Sponge cake is easy to make, as you just need to remember that for every egg you add two ounces of flour, sugar and butter or margarine. Obviously if you’re using metric measures it’s a little less easy to remember, as you have to add 57g of each.

Take a round 9in cake tin and grease and line it. Pre-heat the oven to 170 degrees Celsius (340 degrees Fahrenheit).

Break the eggs’ yolks, then put the eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder and softened butter or margarine into the mixer or mixing bowl and blend until the mixture is smooth and full of air. The longer you mix it, the lighter your cake will be, but be careful not to mix for too long. As soon as you see it form a slightly gritty milkshake consistency, stop.

Spoon out a quarter of your mixture into each of three bowls, leaving one quarter in the mixing bowl. Add a desert spoon full of drinking chocolate powder to the first bowl, a few drops of one of your food colourings to the second bowl, and a few drops of the other colour to the third bowl. Stir each bowlful so that the colours and powder are well blended into each quarter of your cake mixture, but don’t mix the colours together.

Now put the various mixtures into your cake tin – including the plain mixture still in the mixing bowl – dropping in spoonfuls of each one randomly. Make sure that you don’t leave air pockets in the tin, but try not to mix the various colours together.

When all of the mixtures are in the tin, break up the chocolate bar using a sharp knife and scatter all over the top.

Put into the oven on a middle shelf and bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until the top springs back up when pressed lightly with the back of a teaspoon.

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