Marble Loaf Cake with Nutella

Recently I had the pleasure of making a new friend on Bakespace. Her name is Dajana and she lives in Italy. She posted a picture of a beautiful marble cake that she made and she swapped out the cocoa powder and used Nutella in it's place. Just seeing her photo and the word Nutella together convinced me that this non baker (that would be me) needs to bake this cake. I definitely panicked a bit because I had to convert the metric measurements to American Standard. I had some help from this lovely lady and some of my other wonderful Bakespace friends, like Shane of Culinary Alchemy. So, equipped with my conversions, Nutella and a couple of glasses of wine, I was ready to go. I'm going to blame it on the wine because I did not read the directions clearly and didn't whip the egg whites just sort of scrambled them. The result was a cake that sunk in the middle. It still tasted great but it was not perfect. Two days later, sans alcohol, I made this cake again. Well, this time it worked! Hooray! I am so proud of myself when I have baking success because, well, it's rare, but I don't mind!

Here's the recipe the way it was given to me originally and next to it I are the American Standard Conversions.

Ingredients:

250 g flour (2 cups)
150-200 g butter (14 Tbsp)
200 g sugar (1 cup minus 1 1/2 TBSP)
4 eggs, whites separated from the yolks
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons cocoa powder / or Nutella

Directions:

1. Whisk the egg whites with a little salt until firm, and set aside.

2. Beat the yolks with sugar, add butter, vanilla and mix well.

3. In a separate bowl, mix the flour with baking powder.

4. Add flour and egg whites to to the batter (alternating - a couple of spoons of flour, then a couple of spoons of egg whites). Mix everything well, and then divide the batter in two. Leave one half yellow, and add cocoa powder or Nutella to the other half.

5. In a bread pan, (greased and floured) alternate yellow and brown mixture. Bake for 40-50 mins at 180°C (350 F), or until a toothpick comes out clean.