Coral Ombré Cake

I wish I could come up with a more clever title, but my creativity has run dry and after you see what my yesterday consisted of, I think you’ll understand. I was browsing my favorite blog i am baker and saw her surprise inside cakes. Immediately inspired, I hit my kitchen….and stayed there for about 3 hours. Not non-stop, mind you, but altogether, it was quite a venture. One, I must say, that was worth every single second! Today I’m sharing how I created and came up with this beautiful (and delicious) Coral Ombre Cake.

Coral Ombré Cake

For all my gluten free foodies, the recipe I used for my basic cake mix can be found here. I SWEAR BY CUP4CUP FLOUR. Yes, that deserves to be all capitalized, because it is, without a doubt, the best for baking. No recipe modification needs to happen, because it is–as its name states–a cup-for-cup substitute for regular flour. Okay, rant done.

For the icing, I love a good buttercream–heavy emphasis on the butter part!

You Will Need:
1 bag 10x sugar
1 cup shortening
2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup-3/4 cup milk

Because this was my first venture in ombre-ing, I wanted to make sure I did it correctly. See: I used 1,000 bowls.
HINT: Just have that in your head ahead of time and make sure you use things that can go in the dishwasher. Makes clean-up a breeze!

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Grease 3, circular cake pans.
*every tutorial I saw said to use a specific size, but I say–so long as they’re all the same size, what does it matter?

3. Mix up the cake batter and divide evenly into 3 mixing bowls.

4. Put food coloring in varying amounts into said bowls. I was going for coral so I did as follows:
Bowl 1: 3 drops red, 1 drop yellow
Bowl 2: 6 drops red, 2 drops yellow
Bowl 3: 12 drops red, 3 drops yellow

5. Bake the cakes at HALF the allotted time given on the recipe. For example, my recipe called for 20-25 minutes, so I baked for 10-12 minutes.
*You are not baking the entire cake in one pan, so if you bake 3 pans for 25 minutes you’re going to have 3 black discs instead of cakes.

6. Remove from oven and let cool. When they have cooled enough to the touch, place in your refrigerator for an hour.

7. Right before you remove from the refrigerator, mix up the buttercream frosting.
*this frosting as a tendency to “crust”, so you’ll need to move kind of quickly

8. Place your darkest cake on a cake stand and frost the top. Place your medium colored cake on top of that and frost again. Place your lightest cake on top and frost again.

It’s okay if some of your frosting begins to seep out the sides!

9. Next, you’ll want to do a crumb coat, something that will keep the cake from crumbling and messing up your outer icing. The easiest way to do this is to place a dollop of frosting on the top and slide it down over the sides.

10. Once you have your crumb coat, your outer icing is entirely up to you!
I chose to place a little dollop of food coloring on my spatula and swirl it around on the outsides. Admittedly, I wish I would have left it white, because it kind of looks like Pepto Bismal pink, BUT! For my first time, I’d say it turned out pretty well!

Please excuse my horrible kitchen lighting!

Now that I’ve done it once, I feel more comfortable and know what I would do differently or change for next time. Happy Baking!