Looks complicated right? Like how do you get those stripes in there, you must have to have a magic wand that you wave right? Wrong! The zebra stripes are actually very easy.
This cake is a mix of peanut butter and chocolate, so I had to make two separate cake batters. The only difficult part of this cake is to make sure your batters are equal in thickness, which sometimes is tricky when making two different cake flavors from scratch. So if you are kind of leery of this, then by all means use a cake mix. Normally I don't like cake mixes, but in cases like this, it makes your life easier. You could also just use one flavor and make different colors of stripes. Your imagination is the only limit.
Spray 2-9 inch round cake pans and line with parchment or wax paper. I use wax paper because it works just as well and is cheaper. Just as a extra insurance policy against anything sticking, I usually give a quick squirt of spray on the top of the paper.
Take a ice cream dipper and plop one flavor of your cake in the middle of your pans, wait a minute then take a dip of the next flavor and put that into the middle of the first one. Wait another minute for it to spread a bit then keep repeating the process. I speeded up the process by banging the pans on the counter to expedite the spreading because I don't have a lot of patience. I'm sure the lady downstairs wondered what in the world I was building up here.....I'm building a cake dang it!!!! Everybody knows you have to make a little noise to create greatness. lol Well maybe not greatness, but it is cool looking, isn't it? I don't know how many different stripes I did, I didn't count, I just kept going until the pan was half full of batter. It took around 45 minutes for the cakes to bake. When they came out of the pans, this is what they looked like....
They looked almost like a cinnamon rolls didn't they? Mmmmmmm, cinnamon rolls....
Since these didn't dome a whole bunch, I chose to just level off the bottom one. Also, in order to preserve the striped look as best I could, I put a thin layer of chocolate frosting between the layers which allowed me more frosting for the outside. I had planned on my chocolate frosting being a dark brown but as I was almost out of cocoa, I just rocked the light chocolate. If this was one I was making for sale, it would be a darker chocolate for sure as the color combo of dark chocolate and the peanut butter ganache would pop a lot better. Anyway, after it was all frosted I popped it into the fridge to firm up the frosting for about 5 minutes while I made the ganache. Once the peanut butter ganache had cooled a bit I poured it over the top and allowed it to drip over the edges, then I took the remainder of the frosting and piped some swirls around the base and a few on the top. Once that was finished, I took a King Size package of Reece's Peanut Butter Cups and chopped them up and scattered them over the top.
So there you have it, easy right? You get a lot of wow for little effort.
Now it's your turn! Let your imagination run wild and come up with something that is totally you!
Tammy
Fluffybutt Cookies
