Apparently baking is following the same trend as clothes/hair/nails/accessories- ombre. In case you haven't heard, ombre is a shift in color from one to another. For hair its usually starting with darker roots and lightening the hair gradually to a blonde or light brown at the tips.
So for my work's anniversary I made an ombre cake complete with ombre icing. It was time consuming, but not that hard… you can do it!
Ingredients:
I bought two WHITE (not yellow, the bleachiest of bleach white, the color turns out better that way) cake mixes, four tubs of WHITE icing (I bought boring white icing because I thought vanilla might have a slight color), and blue food coloring (or your ombre color of choice). My cake was going to be white to blue. I used four round 8 inch pans.
1) I made the cake batter per the instructions on the box, each box in separate bowls. For the first bowl I put half of the batter in one pan to be my base white color. The second half of the batter I put in two or three drops of food coloring and mixed. This portion went into the second pan.
2) For the second bowl of batter I add three drops of food color and mixed the whole thing initially so it is already the same color of the previous layer. Next I add two or three drops of the whole batter and mix. Take half of that batter and place in a pan. The last section of batter gets another two or three drops more then goes into a pan. What I think is best to do is to get your pans and line them up with the colors going white to blue to see if your colors are evenly spaced. What I noticed is that I needed to make everything bluer, my cake was a tinge on the green side. But start with just a little coloring then work your way up because you can't take away food coloring once its mixed in. Also don't go crazy with the food coloring because too much food coloring messes with the taste of the cake. IF you don't have four pans to compare the colors all in a row (like a normal person… who has four 8 inch round pans?) just be sure that no two layers are the same color. As long as you have a white layer and no two layers have the same amount of blue you're pretty good.
3) Bake all four layers. As everything is cooling take your white icing and divide it into four bowls (you could also do three). One bowl will stay white (this should have the most icing in it because you are covering the top of your cake in it and filling the layers between the cakes). The rest will get the same coloring process as the cake. The first bowl gets one or two drops, the second gets three or four, the third gets six to eight. Again, this is a personal aesthetic thing and also depends on the type of icing you have. Just make sure your colors aren't too close together and you don't use too much food coloring. You want your icing colors (besides the white) to be in the same hue (light blue icings should not have an indigo as the most extreme, it should probably be a sky blue with everything gradually getting lighter from there). With all of that said, you can sort of botch these colors like you can't with the cake because they are all sort of blending together in the end always.
4) Make sure your cakes are completely cool. Place the darkest layer of cake on a plate or cake stand and cover with just plain white icing. Place the next darkest over it and so on and so fourth until all of your layers have white icing filling and go from darkest to lightest. Your top should be your white cake layer. To making icing the sides easier, try to get all of your layers flush together and cut off any pieces that may be sticking out. If you do this, place your hand on the top of the cake, stand up and look down to make sure you don't shave off too much on one side (no oval cakes here). Also, if you do this be careful with icing because crumbs from the sides will stick into the icing. Put a large dab on your knife and go one way the whole time and make sure the area is completely covered before going back over it again (and clean your knife off on a paper towel a lot!).
5) Cover the top of your cake with white icing and down the sides of the white layer of cake. Don't make a sharp line of white, but taper the icing downwards past the first layer a little bit. Place the rest of your blue icings in their own individual plastic bags and cut off the tips. Draw a thick line around each layer with the closest coordinating color. I do this because you want each blue evenly distributed around the cake. Get a flat knife and slowly start to smooth out the icings starting from the top down, left to right. Blend the white with the next lightest blue, then the lightest blue with the next blue and so on. Blend everything and then go back and add more icing in places needed.
Viola!
Viola!
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