Checkerboard Cake

Checkerboard cake is more of a cake baking technique than a recipe. The magic is in the alternating bands of light and dark that make up the checkerboard when stacked and sliced. You can buy checkerboard pans but you don't need to. In fact, I think it takes a bit of the sport out of it and it's pretty clear that somebody must have been making checkerboard cakes before there was a demand for the pans. So how?
Two Layer Checkerboard Cake - technique by Nana
You need two half recipes of light and dark cake. Yellow and chocolate, strawberry and vanilla, it's up to you.
Two 9 inch round cake pans.
A bunch of tin foil.
The trick here is to be able to pour two different kinds of cake batter into the same pan in an organized way. You do this with tin foil dams. Take an 18 inch piece of tinfoil and fold it over on itself until you have a strip about two inches wide and 18 inches long. Then form this into a circle that divides the pan into an inner circle and an outer circle. Now make another one and do the same for the second pan. Now for the tricky part. You need to pour one color into the inside circle of one pan, and the outside circle of another. Now do the same for the second color. When your oven in preheated gently pull the foil circles out of the pan and bake. The colors will remain separate and when you stack the cakes and cut you get the effect seen in the picture. You can go as crazy as you want with this technique, you can make two loops or three loops or hearts or cows or whatever you want. The checkerboard cake kits just supply you with pre-made plastic loops that do a more precise job of what you do with the tinfoil, no mystery.
Go ahead and make a checkerboard cake and show it off. When people ask you how you did it, just tell them it's magic. It sort of is.