4th of July cake

This was my very first checker board cake.  I had a lot of fun making it but as I was making it I thought of a few different ways to make it easier on the next one.

Before purchasing the pan that I needed to create this I read the comments.  One of the main things I made sure I did was to have a thicker cake mix, which one person said to use Duncan Hines.

Another person had commented that it called for 3 cake mixes but that 2 was plenty.  That was true, but.....what I realized is that once the cake mix was ready I had to separate it into 3 sections to color.  I figured for the next cake that I would do 3 cake mixes but add the color to each cake mix so that I won't have to separate them out, and I would make cupcakes with the left over batter.

Also, I had a not so easy time getting the batter into the special cake pan around the plastic insert that separates the colors, so I thought that next time I would use a piping bag to put the batter into the pans.  I used a measuring cup and it worked but it was a little bit difficult.

This is my cake before it was cut.

This is the cake when it came out of the oven.

I did have a lot of fun making this cake. I purchased the specialized pans from Michael's.  The pans are a product of Wilton so you can purchase them online too if you can't make it to Michael's.