Zebra Cake Copycat

     Since I felt bad for not posting any baked goods this week, I decided to post something I originally wasn't going to. This zebra cake caught my eye on pinterest and is very similar to the one from notquitenigella.com. I usually try to be more original, but I had to try this because I had been completely confused about how to get a vertical stripe pattern in a cake until I found this. I had seen pictures of them before and I have put a lot of thought into this, but I was shocked by how easy it actually is. The other reason why I wasn't going to post this is because I made the mistake of cutting the recipe in half so I wouldn't end up eating a huge cake by myself, so the striped pattern you'll see in the pictures is not as clear and even as it would be in a full-sized cake. Check out the original website for some much better pictures of what the full-sized version will look like!

INGREDIENTS:
(for a 12inch cake)
2 tablespoons butter
8 ounce block cream cheese, softened
1/3 cup milk
2 tablespoons flour
1 tablespoon cornstarch
pinch of salt
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 cup sugar
6 eggs, separated
2 tablespoons cocoa powder

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat the oven to 325. Grease and flour a 12inch springform pan. Wrap a pice of foil around the bottom and sides of the outside of the pan. Then, find a casserole dish big enough for the pan to sit inside and fill it 1/4 full with water. Don't put the cake pan in the water until the batter is in it. At that point, if the cake pan floats, there's too much water.
2. Melt the cream cheese, butter, and milk together in a glass bowl on top of a small pot of boiling water. Whisk it well, then put it in the fridge while you separate the eggs.
3. Carefully separate the eggs and beat the whites with the lemon juice and sugar on high speed in a cold bowl until they look like whipped cream. For several tips on how to beat egg whites, see my previous post about soufflé.
4. Add the flour, cornstarch, and egg yolks to the cream cheese mixture. Then gently fold in the egg whites, 1/3 at a time.

5. Get another bowl and divide the batter in half. Be as precise as possible. Now add the cocoa powder to one bowl. Make sure both batters are mixed thoroughly and that they have the same consistency. Every time I make any kind of black and white cake, the chocolate batter seems denser than the white. This must be because the cocoa powder thickens it, and I suspect that this is why the white stripes of cake in my pictures are not as wide as the chocolate stripes. So if the white batter seems runnier to you, try adding just a very small amount of flour to the it until it matches the consistency of the chocolate.

6. For this part, you'll need a tablespoon and a steady hand (unlike mine). Start assembling the cake by taking spoonfuls of white batter and plopping them in the middle of the cake pan until they make a circle. The circles should be smaller than the circumference of the pan, but they will spread out on their own as you add more. On top of the white batter circle, add a few tablespoons of chocolate batter to make another, slightly smaller circle, that fits inside the first white batter one.

7. Continue this pattern of stacking smaller and smaller circles of batter, alternating colors. Eventually, the first few layers will spread out to fill the edges of the pan, but as you get closer to being done, the batter circles you will need to make will get very small. Be as careful as you can to avoid dripping batter onto areas of the opposite color. You'll see I messed up a couple of times, no big deal. When the circles get too small to look like circles, you're done. Even if you have extra, just bake that up in a separate pan or throw it out if it's not much.

8. BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL not to tilt the pan as you carry it. Place it in the water in the casserole dish and make sure the foil is still snug and it doesn't float. Bake for 1 hour. Then let it cool for 15 minutes before removing it from the pan.

9. Now it's very important to chill the cake thoroughly and quickly. This is probably just my food safety paranoia, but I can't stand it when cheesecakes take hours and hours to chill in the middle. Most actual bakers would probably find this ridiculous, but I usually take all of my cheesecakes out of the pans and immediately put them in the freezer for 1-2 hours. Then I move them to the fridge, and slice in only once they're completely cold.

     Sorry it's not the greatest picture of the inside. I think it will look better in a full-sized cake, which I will make one of these days and then post here to compare. In case I didn't make this clear, this is technically a cheesecake, but it's more of a cheesecake/normal cake hybrid. It's like magic how it rises and makes the zebra pattern. It doesn't even need a crust or frosting that would detract from it's visual appeal. So try it, and let me know how the pattern works for you. I clearly haven't mastered this one yet, but I thought it was so cool, I had to share it anyway!