Ombré Birthday Cake!

Two of my loveliest gal pals share a birthday, and I wanted to make them something special! Although we were meeting at a restaurant, I thought a cute dessert would be appreciated (and it was!!). I chose to make the girliest cake I could possibly think of - pink fun-fetti with floral details!

I cheated - I have a baby, I'm sorry - and used a box cake mix, BUT!! I added a little bit of maraschino cherry juice for a little extra flavor! I also used a handy layer cake pan set to make five 6" round layers - this way you can bake all the layers at the same time, and color them differently! I made the top layer plain, then added a drop or two of coloring to the batter after pouring out each layer. It turned out so pretty!! 

For the icing, I used my usual recipe plus a little extra oomph:

1 C vegetable shortening (i.e. Crisco)

4 C powdered sugar

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp almond flavoring

1/2 tsp lemon flavoring

1 tsp cherry juice* (this was for fun, flavor, and color!)

milk or water for thinning

pink food coloring

I used my Wilton icing tip #104 to make rose-like swirls all over the cake. It didn't quite come together until the top was done, and I finally was happy with how it looked!

To give the petals a little more depth, I used a tiny paint brush (a cheap little guy, like the watercolor sets of our youth!) and "painted" some stripes of food coloring directly into the piping bag so that some of the edges would have more color. To be honest, there was one side that was SUPER BRIGHT and the others were less so as the icing kept coming, but it worked out fairly well!

I think the birthday gals (and party guests!) were pretty happy to have a lady layer cake! And despite looking wee, it was INCREDIBLY tall so the whole cake easily fed about 12 of us. Hooray for party snacks!! Happy birthday, gals!!