I wanted to make cake. But not just any cake. A fun cake. With a challenge (ish). I’ve wanted to try a checkered cake for years, so I finally did! And it turned out well!! A checkered cake lives up to it’s name, when cut it has a distinctive pattern, often in brown and white but can be in other colours too (even 3 colours or rainbows!).
As there are only 2 people in my house, I didn’t want to make a huge cake. But this cake requires at lease 2 layers. Instead of making 2 batches, I divided 1 batch in half. It resulted in quite thin cakes, but this just meant a better buttercream to cake ratio!
I used a simple butter cake recipe from Women’s Weekly Quick Mix Cakes (actually it’s a cupcake recipe but we’ve always used it for cakes too). I added cocoa to the second batch for colour and flavour, which didn’t change the texture too much.
I baked in similar sized pans (I don’t have the same sized round pans), so after they cooked for 15 to 20 mins and were cool, I had to trim them to size. I also didn’t measure half the batter, so the vanilla cake was slightly lower than the chocolate. This was easily disguised by buttercream 😉 (if it were the reverse, I could have used chocolate buttercream to disguise it).
To assemble the checkered pattern, I had to cut concentric circles from the cakes of the same size, then swap the rings around so it alternated like in the picture above. I used various crockery as guides to cut my 2 stacked cakes. Then, very carefully, I separated the rings and restacked them as shown. A layer of buttercream and then the next layer of cake. My chocolate rings kept breaking in half, but it didn’t matter too much as they fit snugly together.
Stack and trim the edges, ready to be cut in concentric circles 
Chop chop! I used crockery to help guide my circles 
Oops. It broke. No worries, it still worked!
Finally, I iced it and used chocolate buttercream to decorate (and hide the lack of white buttercream around the edges). I wanted to have the edges covered so that cutting into it would reveal a surprise! I am impressed how well it stays together, considering there is nothing binding the rings together. I guess the layers of buttercream are strong in this one.
Bake on,
Beth
Testing out my piping skills 
Beth's Baking 
Awesome looking cake. You make it look so simple.
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Awesome looking cake. You make it look so simple.
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The hardest parts are finding the right sized crockery and making sure the rings don’t fall apart when you lift them xD
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