I'm a home baker, and have never baked a "marble cake." So, naturally, I came to my learning mecca, CC! Well, I see there are some real debates going on between "experienced bakers" and "novice bakers" about the fact that marble cake is just a white/yellow/etc. recipe swirled in with a chocolate/fudge cake recipe and VOILA: MARBLE CAKE!

BUT I have an educated lay-baker's question: don't your cake recipes have to be of similar consistency and/or weight to bake together well? I mean, I have a great white cake recipe, but I haven't ever really settled on a chocolate cake recipe, so any one I use wouldn't necessarily have the same density or baking chemistry that the white recipe would. Wouldn't that cause one to bake faster than the other, within the same cake?? Or what if the chocolate recipe I find is more of a "fudgy" cake, versus the light and fluffy white recipe I use? I have to imagine that this would cause problems in the baking and final product.

Is THAT question legitimate!??  

You just make a white or yellow cake batter.  Pour 1/3 or 1/2 of the batter in separate bowl; then add melted chocolate or cocoa  to one part of the batter.  One recipe for both the chocolate and white/yellow part of the cake.  Just Google marble cake recipe and you will have a number of recipes to choose from both scratch and box.

I thought the same thing, that it was two separate batters, not something simple like adding chocolate to one mix. Thanks for asking this Irlt2000 and for clearing it up Narie

............make a white or yellow cake batter.  Pour 1/3 or 1/2 of the batter in separate bowl; then add melted chocolate or cocoa ............

Yes, this ^^^ :)

I sometimes would just take some dry cocoa powder and add some oil as my choco batter - especially if making a small cake.

Also I have made many different flavors of 'marbled' cake - strawberry, cherry, lemon, etc.

The problem I've had with just adding cocoa or melted chocolate to a white batter is that it's not a real dark chocolate cake then. For marble, I would think I'd want a nice dark chocolate to contrast with the white/yellow. 

Anyway, I made two separate recipes yesterday. The chocolate one is SUPER SUPER thick--almost like brownie batter--and my white is really runny! I tried to thin the chocolate batter with buttermilk, but was afraid to add too much acidity, because it was a non-Dutch process cocoa recipe :) As I feared, it was NOT easy to swirl without totally mixing them together. They also baked weird--wrinkly, bubbly tops while baking, and then they sort of got lopsided. They are fine for stacking, though, so we'll see how they look when trimmed and stacked today or tomorrow. 

I don't get to taste this cake, so I will try to get a testimonial from my friend, who's ordering the cake.