This past weekend I started working on a celebration cake.  My daughter graduates in a few days (yikes!) & I’m resurrecting my creative baking skills to make a fun, unique & apropos graduation cake!  She requested USD Torrero colors (blue & white) for the bottom layers of this multi-tiered cake. 

Marbling is a great way to incorporate color, so I did a bit of research to improve my marbling techniques…which, I think, turned out pretty darn well!  If you have an upcoming event requiring a showy cake, give this a try!

Ingredients (makes 2 cakes)

• 2-1/4 c cake flour
• 2-1/2 t baking powder
• 1/2 t salt
• 1-1/4 c sugar
• 1/2 c butter
• 1 c milk
• 1 t vanilla
• 4 egg whites
• Desired color(s) in gel or liquid form

Have all ingredients at room temperature.  Preheat oven to 375 deg (see NOTES below).

Sift cake flour with baking powder & salt.  In stand mixer, cream butter & sugar until fluffy, about 1-2 min.  Combine milk & vanilla.

Add dry ingredients to butter mixture in 3 parts, alternating with the liquid ingredients.  After each addition, stir the batter until just incorporated & smooth.

With a hand mixer, beat egg whites to stiff, but not dry.  Fold them lightly into the batter.

Divide batter in half & add color as desired, mixing gently until color is incorporated & uniform.

Prepare cake pans by buttering bottom.  Cut out parchment circle to fit into bottom of pan.  Butter & flour parchment paper.  

Marbling Technique:  Alternately dollop spoonfuls of each batter widthwise across the pan, so it looks like thick stripes of each color.  It’s okay if they overlap a bit, but they shouldn’t be directly on top of each other.  Use a knife or a metal or wooden skewer to swirl your colors together.  Insert the knife or skewer into the batter until it almost touches the bottom of the pan & drag it through in figure-8 patterns.  Be decisive & don’t be too deliberate with making a “pattern”.  Do 3 or 4 strokes total (if you over-swirl, it will all be nasty…and you want definition of color).  You can do the figure-8s in different sizes.  Just don’t do more than 4!  

NOTES:

• Bake until skewer inserted into center comes out clean, about 25 min.
• Since my cakes will be layered, I want to minimize the “doming”.  Doming happens when the sides of the cake cook faster than the center resulting in a very high, puffed-up center.  Less doming means less that I have to cut off to make the cake flat.  I used several techniques to minimize doming…
  1. Lower the oven temp by 10 deg & bake a bit longer.  I baked mine at 365 deg for 30 min.
  2. Use lighter colored and/or glass pans.  The darker the color, the faster the baking.  If you use dark pans, the edges will cook quite quickly & the doming increases.  I baked one layer in a dark pan & one layer in a lighter pan.  The lighter pan was definitely flatter.  Glass would work even better.