Marbelized? Marbleized? Whatever, It's A Swirly Cake!

Ahh, baking a cake.  One of my favorite pastimes.  Granted it doesn't happen all that frequently seeing as how an entire cake left alone in the house with just The Husband and I disappears at an alarming rate.  Nonetheless, over the past year, really ever since I made the Spider-Man cake, I have found myself growing ever more fascinated with the art of decorating cakes.  Learning how to use different icing tips, experimenting with food coloring, trying different recipes, etc.  I find I take just about every opportunity that presents itself to bake a cake because it has become something I truly love learning about.  I think I'm getting pretty good at making the outsides fun and pretty but for the most part my cakes themselves tend to be all but pretty.  Generally my rationale is that all my time will be spent on the icing and therefore it's ok to not focus on the cake but what if I told you you could take your favorite tasty recipes and consistently make them pretty as well?

Marbleizing anything, whether it be cake or coffee cake has always been something I struggle with.  No matter how much I may stir up the batter with my trusty butter knife it never does more than the occasional wave here and there while, for the most part, remaining unchanged.  But no more!  I declare that those days are behind me for The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book has shown me the error of my ways.  For this cake I'm using simple vanilla and chocolate batters.

You begin by placing one quarter of the vanilla batter  in a cake tin and spreading it around as evenly as possible.

Now add half of your chocolate batter and spread that around.

And on top of that, you guessed it, a quarter of the white batter gets spread around.

Now for the fun part!  Take a butter knife or a spatula, whatever your weapon of choice is and begin swirling it around.  I was initially afraid to get too close to the bottom thinking I would scrape some of the grease off causing the cake to stick after it had baked but I am here to tell you Do Not Be Afraid! 

Recipes are always telling me to make only a few strokes but in my experience more has always been better!  This is what a beautifully marbleized cake should look like out of the oven. 

And this is what a beautifully marbleized cake should look like when cut.  It just warms my heart to see all of the swirls.

And there you have it!  Repeat this process for the second pan and you'll find you'll have used all of your cake batter and have two fantastic looking cakes to serve!

Tune in next week to find out what this cake became. :)

Thanks for reading and happy baking!