Wild About Cake!

My daughter is completely obsessed with animal prints, mostly zebra stripes.  For her birthday, she chose a theme with bright pink and purple zebra stripe patterns.  I always like to make her cake myself to match her theme.  After a lot of thought, I decided that I would win the "Awesome Mom" award by making her cake zebra striped ... not the icing, but the cake itself!

I used one cake mix here, and divided it into two bowls.  One has cocoa added for chocolate and one has purple food coloring.  You can also use pureed fruit to color your cake.

The initial instructions depend on how big your cake is going to be.  If you are doing a large cake that requires more than one cake mix, use two different flavors or put food coloring in one mix.  If you are doing a smaller cake, divide the mix into two bowls.

Make sure to grease and flour your pan or baking dish so that the cake comes out easily, and don't forget to preheat your oven!

FYI ... if you try this, purple and chocolate become very similar in color after it is baked.

Start by drizzling one color/flavor into the pan in a stripe pattern.  Some "globs" are ok, because zebra stripes are not perfect, but try to keep them at a minimum.

Continue layering in stripes of batter, alternating colors/flavors.  Make sure not to put too much per layer.  The amount that you see here works very well.

This one is ready for the oven!

After you have layered all of your cake mix, bake according to your mix/recipe instructions.  After it is baked you will immediately see the stripes.

This is a different cake than the one that you saw in "batter stage".  Remember me saying that purple and chocolate are almost the same color after baked?  This one is chocolate and strawberry.

As if it doesn't look amazing enough already, do you want to see what the inside looks like?  Hold onto your hat!

Have you ever seen more beautiful zebra stripes in your life!?  :)