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I have my mum to thank for my love of cooking and baking. I grew up helping her and my yiayia (grandma) in the kitchen before I got too cool for such humdrum activities.

And although my mother is a formidable cook that tackles complicated recipes when the fancy takes her, it is this everyday marble cake recipe that sticks in my mind.

This recipe, titled ‘simple cake’ in my mum’s Greek cookery bible, was baked on both on special occasions and on weekday evenings.

My mum varied the recipe a lot – sometimes making a vanilla cake with a white glaze, more often a chocolate marble cake with rich chocolate icing.

It doesn’t matter what form the cake took though, it was always indescribably soft, fragrant and delicious. I wanted to share a recipe of my mum’s that is special to me for Mother’s Day… and I knew it HAD to be this simple marble pound cake.

overhead view of marble pound cake in a loaf tin

So I emailed my mum to ask for the recipe and she send me a photo from her cookery book.

And this is where I realised my mum’s genius for baking. Because the recipe in the book doesn’t read like a recipe, it’s more like general cake guidelines: 3-4 eggs, 1 bag of flour, 1 teacup butter…

recipe from an old greek cookery book for marble cake

My mum’s note in her email said ‘as you can see this calls for too much flour – use less!’ But fear not… I have managed to navigate these rather obscure instructions to produce the very cake my mum used to make. And it is just as fluffy and delicious as I remember it.