Zebra Striped Cake

One of my best friends, Megan, loves zebra print everything, so when I stumbled across this pin to make a zebra striped cake, I knew this was totally happening for her birthday!  Here's the site the pin lead to, and here's the site with the detailed description on how to make zebra stripes.

First step, make the cake batter. The tutorial page said they used Duncan Hines Devil’s Food Cake and Duncan Hines French Vanilla.

We chose these because they don’t have pudding in the mix (like Pillsbury & Betty Crocker, which can be a little thick for this project–although I love them for anything else). We made slight changes to the box directions: French Vanilla Cake– We used 1 cup plus 3 Tablespoons Water rather than the 1 cup that it calls for. Devil’s Food- We used the box directions, no changes

I chose to make my cake from scratch.  Here's their advice for that:
 
As a side note, if you would like to try this cake with a scratch recipe, you can choose your favorite white or yellow cake recipe and then divide it approx. in half– you can stir approx 3 tablespoons or so of dutch processed cocoa powder into one of your bowls of batter to create chocolate batter.

Here's the recipe I used.  I read the recipe on the unsweetened cocoa powder box for a chocolate cake said to use 3/4 cup of cocoa powder.   I gradually added the cocoa powder and tested the batter.  I ended up using the whole 3/4 cup.  

Here's my finished batters:

 

Then...

We started by dropping 1/4 cup of vanilla batter into the middle of our 8″ pan.  It will spread a little bit. Then...Measure out a 1/4 cup of chocolate batter and pour it in the center of your vanilla batter. Repeat this process, continuing with 1/4 cup scoops of alternating flavors, each flavor of batter dropped into the center of the previous circle of batter. The batter is thin enough that it does not take long at all for the batter to spread out a little bit.

My cake batter was too thick:

 

I added 1/4 cup more of milk, and it started spreading better...but not well enough.  Looks like I need to use thinner batter to make this work better:

Time to bake the cake.  This was how it turned out.  I was really nervous to cut into it...

But, it came out with stripes and the birthday girl loved it: 

 

My cake's stripes were thicker than the picture from the tutorial, but it still looked cool.  Maybe using 1/8 of a cup of batter at a time would have been better since my batter was on the thick side.

Overall, it was a success.  It was definitely time consuming to make two batters and layer them, and it was frustrating since my batter was thick, but it worked!  The cake itself tasted great, and would be a great cake to make for an occasion instead of using a box mix that contains trans fat.

Bottom Line: LOVED IT!