Pink Ombre Rose Cake

One of my good friends Lauren just celebrated her 30th birthday. Now, Lauren is one of the hardest working women I know. She works an office job and is also a professional photographer (and voted as our city’s best in 2012), so I knew she needed an extra special cake to help celebrate this milestone birthday! After seeing an ombre cake on Pinterest, I knew I wanted to give one  whirl. Now, don’t fret if you are thinking “that is way too detailed and complicated for me”. It’s not. It’s actually way easier than you think. Let’s get to the recipe, so I can show you how to make your own ombre cake!

Ombre Cake Recipe

• 3 boxes of French Vanilla cake mix
• 9 eggs
• 3 cups of water
• 1 1/2 cups melted butter
• 1 vanilla bean scrapped
• 3 tsp vanilla

Combine all of the ingredients until the batter is nice and smooth and free of lumps.  Grease a 7″ round cake pan and fill it with the white cake batter. Now this is where your gradual coloring comes in. Using Wilton Gel Coloring, add a teeny bit and mix until the batter becomes a light pink. Pour another 7″ round cake pan filled of light pink batter. Bake the two cake pans as recommended on the back of the cake box (mine was for 350°F for 23 minutes).

Now add more pink coloring to your batter and mix until you get a darker pink, pour into a cake pan. For the last cake pan, my batter wouldn’t get any darker so I added a teeeeeny tiny bit of purple food coloring to darken the pink up then poured it into my cake pan. You also will have enough left over batter to make 12 cupcakes to go with your cake!

Once your four cakes have baked, set them aside to cool for 10 minutes, remove from the cake pans and allow to fully cool on a cooling rack. Now it’s time to prep your buttercream.

Ombre Buttercream Icing

• 2 cups room temperature butter
• 3-6 cups of icing sugar (depending how thick you like your icing to be)
• 4 tsp Madagascar vanilla
• 2 tsp Mexican vanilla
• 1 vanilla bean scrapped
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp Wilton butter flavoring
• 1/4-1/2 cup heavy cream

Before we get into the instructions for the buttercream, I cannot stress enough how important it is to taste and go with adding ingredients. Do the wet ingredients one teaspoon at a time, taste and go. Start by whipping the cr*p out of the butter. I mean REALLY whip it… whip it good…This should take at least 5 minutes on a high speed until your butter gets nice and fluffy. Now add in your icing sugar one cup at a time. Continue to whip and add until you get a consistency you like. Add you vanillas, vanilla beans, salt and butter flavouring. Whip again. Slowly add your cream last. If your icing is too runny, add more icing sugar. Too Thick? Add more cream.

Now the fun part, time to build you cake! Make sure to level off all your cakes using a cake leveller (link below) – this ensures that the cake stacks nicely and most of all, looks great after your done.

Put your white cake on your serving plate and coat the top with a layer of icing (this is called a crumb coat and will help everything stick together and make your cake look pretty). Continue with your light pink, medium pink and dark pink cake slabs. Once they are all stacked, coat the outside of the cake with a smooth layer of butter cream.

Next up are your little buttercream roses. Load an icing bag with a Wilton 1M tip (and you’ll need a large coupler for this too – both are linked below) and start to pipe one row of white roses.

 I eyeballed my ombre to the size of the cake layers and just worked my way bottom to top of the cake. To ice a rose, start in the middle and make a circle, drawing it outwards. Once you have a complete circle, trace the outside again with buttercream until a nice rose forms. You can watch this video if you need some visual aid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7WQIHzpO5E 

Now just like you did with the cake batter, gradually start to dye your icing. Add in a bit of food coloring, mix, pip on a row of roses, add more food coloring, pipe more roses until you are done!

The beautiful part of this cake may just be in the inside, because once you cut into it, lovely ombre layers are revealed. A rich pink down to an ivory white. Overall, the cake is a show stopper!

I hope this recipe shows that an ombre cake is actually pretty easy to make! I hope who ever the recipient of the cake is enjoys it as much as Lauren enjoyed hers!

Carlene