[3] The usage of chocolate in the Rhein-Ruhr area in the twentieth century has now made this a common version of marble cake across Germany and Austria.

[3] One popular variation of this recipe during Victorian times was “Harlequin cake,”[1] which was baked with checkerboard patterns.

[citation needed] In the field of geology, the "Marble Cake Mantle" model refers to the theory of an earth wherein "elongated strips of subducted oceanic lithosphere... are stretched and thinned by the normal and shear strains in the convecting mantle, and are destroyed by being reprocessed at ocean ridges or, on the centimetre scale, by dissolution processes.

The metaphor of marble cake is meant to conceptualize how local, state, and federal governments have interacting, interrelated policy goals.

[6] In 2019, British-American television host John Oliver unveiled a 600 sq ft (56 m2) marble cake on an episode of his comedy series Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, featuring an image of Turkmenistan's autocratic president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow falling off a horse during a race, intended to satirize Berdimuhamedow's penchant for amassing world records.