Starbucks Chocolate Swirl Loaf Cake

The Starbucks Chocolate Swirl Loaf Cake costs £4.30 and carries 439 calories with 3.8g of fibre and 28g of sugar. A marbled vanilla and chocolate loaf, sold by the slice.

28g of sugar is on the low side for the Bakery case, below both cake cubes and every muffin, and well under the Victoria sponge at 49g. A marbled loaf carries no filling and no frosting, which is where most of the sugar in this case actually lives.

3.8g of fibre is high for a plain cake and comes from the cocoa in the dark half. Cocoa solids are genuinely fibrous, which is the same reason the brownie reaches 3.9g.

Saturated fat at 8.9g sits in the middle of the case, roughly half what the coconut cube carries at 16g. Total fat is 27g and salt is 0.74g, the third highest here.

Marble cake is one of the few bakes where the appearance is genuinely random rather than controlled, and a case of slices from the same loaf will look noticeably different from one another. Nothing about the recipe changes between them, so a plainer looking slice is not a worse one, which is worth knowing before asking to swap.

The swirl is made by dropping two batters into the tin alternately and drawing a knife through once. Once is the operative word: a marbled cake stirred more than that turns uniformly brown, which is why the pattern varies between slices and why some are far more striking than others.

A loaf cake is also the format most forgiving of a day on the shelf, which is part of why it is sold this way. The dense crumb of a marbled loaf stales far more slowly than an aerated sponge, so a slice bought late in the day is closer to how it was in the morning than most of this case manages.

It declares soya, egg, almonds, wheat and milk, with no diet labelling published. Prices reach £4.85 on delivery. The banana nut loaf is the other loaf and the lighter one at 368 calories.