My obsession with swirled cakes started innocently enough. Strolling through the local discount store, a brightly colored designer cake placed exactly at eye level caught my attention. Pinks and whites. Multiple shades of purple. Rainbows in all hues. Even camouflage.

Fascinated, I picked up the box. “Surely, this is some sort of complex process that takes hours and hours and more baking know-how than I possess.”

It doesn’t.

It doesn’t even require a special, expensive cake mix.

It does require creativity and a little bit of patience.

To create a swirl cake, you’re need one or two cake white or flavored cake mixes. Two or three different food colors. For my first experiments, I used white and chocolate cake mix and purple and orange food colors.

 

Make the chocolate mix per the directions and set it aside. Then make the white cake mix and divide it in to two bowls. Next add food color until you achieve the desired color. Cake batter will bake duller than the raw batter.

Liberally grease and flower your pan. For my first attempt, I had only a bundt cake pan.

Now for the patience.

With a ½ cup size measuring cup, scope up batter and pour it into the center of the pan. Let the batter spread out. With a clean measuring cup, scope up a colored batter and slowly pour it on top of the chocolate batter. Allow that to spread out on top of the first scope. Alternate colors until you’ve used all the batter. Make sure you give each color time to spread across the cake pan.  Because I was using a bundt cake pan, I had to pour cake mix on both sides since it wasn't spreading out as nicely as I hoped. 

Once you’ve used up all the batter, bake according to the directions. After the cake came out of the oven and cooled, I frosted it in white frosting colored orange. When I sliced into I could see the beautiful marbled striations. 

Lesson learned from this cake: make sure there's enough differentiation in colors. In this cake, the purple blends in with the chocolate. You can see the purple better in the photo than you could in person. Also, a bundt cake pan isn't the most ideal for swirling as it doesn't allow the colors to spread out across very well.

For my next attempt I went bolder with the colors and used a sheet pan. This time, I used three bold colors in addition to chocolate. I dropped the batter in the center of the pan, but it still migrated to one end of the pan. To fill the pan, I ended up swirling batter at the opposite end of pan.

Again, I used a 1/2 cup measuring cup to drop the batter into the pan. On a sheet pan, the bands ended up being thinner than on the bundt cake version.