I just took this (16 inch) cake out of the oven and it has a.... CROP CIRCLE... on it! What is that? I have never had this happen before. It doesn't really matter, its just weird!

Gheesh, thats weird! Almost looks like the oven element. Maybe you had it too close to it and it cooked there more?? Really strange!

Looks like oil, maybe?

It looks to me like the pan grease was melty and when you poured your batter in some rode up on the batter and formed that funny ring. Either that or your batter had a ring of oil around the bowl that wasn't mixed all the way and it in rode the batter while it was being poured in.

that IS strange!

So...it's not a crop circle?

Did you pour batter into the pan at two different times? Like make and pour one batch, then mix up another and pour that in around it? It looks like a ring of cake release or whatever you use on your pans that got sandwiched between two separate pourings. ??? Or we could call Agent Mulder... (sorry...old X-Files fan here! )

I still think its a crop circle

It is two batches of batter but they were poured into the pan at the same time. I greased the pans with crisco but the flower nails are sprayed with bake easy (or whatever its called). Perhaps I got overzealous when spraying them. I am just surprised that it made a circle like that.
And its making the cake crack around that circle. Yikes. Hopefully I can still use it.

OK it happened again. This time it was an 8inch pan with no flower nail. Pan was greased with crisco but shouldnt have been melty. I think the batter was well mixed. Weird.

Cake circles

They're nothing to worry about.

It's when they start resembling dead celebrities that you need to start worrying.

This same thing happened to me about 2 months ago in a 9 x 13 it was weird. It never haopened before and it hasn't happened again. I too was baffled by it.