Ombre Birthday Cake

I'm a tiny bit behind in uploading these posts. My birthday was on March 16th, yay go Pisces. For the month of March the theme of the bakes were Jasmine's choice. I knew I wanted to make my own birthday cake and I wanted to do a few different techniques. I went with an ombre cake, in my favorite color blue.... water sign. I also wanted to use my favorite flavors, so I added a lemon and coconut curd. I left the buttercream just vanilla, and the cake flavor vanilla also. I added silver and gold leaf because I'm extra and I think the cake came out beautifully and delicious.

Finished ombre cake slice

Finished cake, it looks so spring like

look at that ombre cake batter

I love the colors

after blending the frosting colors, sort of like watercoloring

perfect meringue with silver foil and teal stripe

Look at these cute little meringue kisses

Close up of the side of the cake. You can see the details of the edible foils.

This post is a little different because I really didn't take as detailed pictures but I will post the recipe.

Vanilla Cake

• 9 egg whites
• 4 1/2 cups cake flour
• 1 1/2 cups butter (room temperature)
• 2 3/4 cups sugar
• 2 tablespoons baking powder
• 2 1/4 cups buttermilk
• 1 1/2 tablespoons vanilla
• different shades of blue gel food coloring

Preheat your oven to 350F and spray 3 8inch round baking pans and set aside.

Sift flour, baking powder, and salt and then set aside.

Stir vanilla and buttermilk together and set aside.

In a stand mixer beat butter and sugar on medium high speed using a paddle attachment ( 5 minutes)

Mix on low add egg whites one at a time.

Add in 1/3 of dry ingredients then 1/2 milk mixture, followed by 1/3 dry mixture and last 1/2 of milk mixture and the last of the dry ingredients.

Divide the cake batter into three bowls and add in gel coloring. Pour in prepared pans and bake at 350F for 30-33 minutes. 

Cool 10-20 minutes before inverting pans

Leave on cooling rack to cool completely

Here's a recipe for the Swiss Meringue Butter Cream and Lemon Curd

For the coconut curd I used the same lemon curd recipe just replaced the lemon curd with 3/4 cups of coconut milk.

I finished the cake with macarons and little meringue kisses and gold and silver. 

I will be making better posts, it's just that I've been so busy with a lot of things and my veggie garden.

Loaded Confetti Cake For The Win!

This has been a busy couple of weeks baking. My mom's and sister's birthday are literally four days apart and you know I had to bake something for both of them. I'm about to flood you guys with some of the items that I baked for them over the course of those couple of days. Also I'm thinking of being basic and posting only pumpkin things for the month of October. I know that technically today is the first day of October but I baked these things in September and I'm just getting the time to post them. Ok back to this post, I really wanted a pretty, whimsical cake for my mom, who just turned 59. Her favorite color is pink so I went with that as my color scheme. Since it was her birthday I went with a confetti cake, who doesn't like sprinkles. Every time I think of birthdays, I think of a mountain of sprinkles. Sprinkles just make you feel young at heart. Oh, since I'm also extra (my sister says I don't know when to stop doing too much) I made this a loaded cake, so I topped it with homemade macarons (pink ones) , homemade meringue kisses, and I made sprinkles ( which was easier than I thought). I made the cake using an adapted recipe of Christina Tosi's Milk Bar birthday cake. I made a giant batch of my cream cheese buttercream because I think it complemented the confetti cake. It looks pretty great right.

loaded confetti cake

Yeah this cake ended up being about 5 layers, I actually baked 6 layers and thought it was too tall, so I just saved that layer crumbled it up and made cake balls with it ( that layer made a lot of cakeballs, so they are in the freezer now!)

This recipe will make enough for three 8 inch layer cakes, so if you want more layers double the recipe.

Confetti Cake Recipe

• 2 1/2 c flour
• 1/4 c cornstarch
• 1 tsp  salt
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 c unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1 1/2 c sugar
• 4 large egg whites
• 1/4 c flavorless oil
• 1 tbs clear imitation vanilla 
• 1 c whole milk
• 1/2 c rainbow sprinkles (or more, I used more than 1/2 cup)

simple ingredients

Preheat oven to 350F



Cream together your butter and sugar together

beat the sugar and butter until light and fluffy

Add in your room temperature egg whites (slowly one at a time) and blend together

Add in your clear vanilla extract ( if you don't have clear I'm sure the brown will work too)

Add in your oil (at the time all I had was olive oil, so I used that)

all mixed together

Add your flour, cornstarch, salt, and baking powder together. whisk or sift to make sure everything is combined.

Add in a third of your flour mixture and mix

Then add half of your milk mixture and mix

Then 1/3 of your flour mixture, then the other half of your milk mixture, then the last third of your flour mixture.

Your batter should look like this

All ready for sprinkles

Ok fun part, the sprinkles, you need to mix the sprinkles in with a spatula by hand. If you use a mixer it will have the sprinkles disintegrate and you will be left with an ugly grey cake.

sprinkle party

I'm kind of obsessed with sprinkles

I also added in some of the homemade sprinkles

the homemade sprinkles were so cute, I had to add them in

All stirred in

ok now place this cake batter into your sprayed pans ( I like to spray my cake pans with spray and also line the bottom with parchment paper to make sure they come out clean)

I thought they were still missing something.

Give your pans a little tap and smooth down the top, this will make sure your cakes are even on top

I added more sprinkles, It was addictive.

More sprinkles, sprinkles never hurt nobody!

Bake your cakes in 350F oven for 25 minutes. (stick a toothpick in the middle of your cake to make sure cakes are fully baked)

here's how they look ( I let them cool in the pans for 7 to 10 minutes before turning them out)

look at that....so pretty

Ok turn them out on cooling racks to cool completely for about 30-45  minutes.

Let them cool, don't forget to remove the parchment paper

Make your butter cream

(I didn't take pictures of that because it's simple and I made it for the red velvet macarons, click here for recipe)

to frost  your 3 layer cake you may want to double the recipe.

time to assemble.

So tall

I filled each layer with the cream cheese butter cream and then went around the sides and top of the cake to apply the crumb coat

Crumb Coat it up

I then placed the whole cake in the fridge for about an hour

Next I applied another layer of cream cheese butter cream to completely frost the entire cake, I used an offset spatula to go around the cake because I wanted it really smooth. Place the cake back in the fridge for about 30 minutes.

I took a little of the frosting and placed it in two bowls to color them pink and a peach color.

I placed little dollops of the colors randomly around the cake

the colors came out great

I took a cake scrapper, dough cutter and went around the cake to smear the colors and smooth the buttercream. I placed sprinkles around the bottom of the cake and placed it in the fridge to set for another 30 minutes.

setting up in the fridge, I could have left the cake like this

I then placed all of my toppings on and smeared chocolate ganache around the cake and this was the end result.

with all the toppings and stuff.

top view

This cake was so pretty and yummy at the same time.

Since this is a loaded cake you can put whatever you'd like on the actual cake. I loved making this cake because I don't make a ton of cakes (I'm trying to bake more). This cake looks like it would be pretty sweet but it actually isn't ( it's the perfect balance and if you don't like cream cheese you can always just make a buttercream, or a whipped ganache.

I think this is a cool, beautiful, tasty cake that you can make. I also froze a couple of slices to see how it freezes, so I'll update you about that in a month.