Ombre

On October 3rd, my little sister Samantha turned 15.  (She got her permit on the 4th and we're all scared.  Just kidding.)  Last Sunday, we celebrated her birthday with a small family get together at my dad's house.  Sam asked me in September if I could make her a pink ombre cake (from white cake) with lemon buttercream frosting.  I figured that would be easy enough, but now that the task is done, I've learned some lessons.

I doubled my white cupcake recipe to make four 9-inch cakes.  This proved to be far too much cake.  Since I had to dye the batter before baking it, I had to divide it all evenly and it ended up being 3 cups of batter in each pan.  I would definitely amend this next time to 1 1/2 cups, which means I could use just one batch since I know now it makes exactly 6 cups of batter.  The layers were very thick (for a four-layer cake, but for a two-layer cake they would have been fine) and they took longer to bake than expected.  (About 32 minutes.)  I ended up making four batches of my usual buttercream frosting, one batch at a time so I wouldn't end up with a crazy amount of unused frosting.  (I still had about 1 1/2 cups left, but I could have put more frosting on the sides.)

I was so excited to make this cake though because I've seen it on Pinterest and I recently got a turn table and an off-set spatula, which made the frosting so much easier and way more fun.  They're cake decorating musts!  I just guessed on how much dye each layer would need.  In the darkest layer, I put 9 drops of red, then I went down to 6, then 3, then 0.  Next time, I think I would put 10 in the darkest and 1 in the lightest.  I didn't really love that the bottom layer wasn't pink at all, but maybe some people do.

The cake turned out delicious, but far too tall.  I cut a quarter of it (which was all 7 of us ate) and cut flat slices instead of wedges.  It made it easier to serve, but it was still too much cake for all of us, so we ended up cutting each slice in half and serving just too layers.

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See what Sam and I did for her 13th birthday here.