LoveCake - building a business: August 2014

My little buddy Fletcher's first birthday cake - my first foray into rainbow interiors in 2013.

There are some seriously pretty things coming out in cake decorating lately. There are also some seriously cool things too. In this off-season (aka winter...the non-wedding season...the season that causes us to break out our cutest scarves and sexiest boots as we try to avoid actually feeling the cold) I find myself buried in birthday orders. Not necessarily as pretty or elegant as wedding cakes but I get to break out the colours at least! I've done several rainbow layered cakes and for my sister in law's baby shower I decided to tweak the style a little and do a blue ombré layered cake (we knew she was having a boy, woo!)

For this particular cake, I've used white chocolate mud cake, but you could use whichever white cake takes your fancy. Definitely make sure the cooked cake is white though, as even a yellow cake will alter your colours. The white chocolate cake batter is slightly yellowish and you'll notice that even that tinges my blue to a spacey galactic green.

To make sure your layers are even, either weigh your batter and divide it that way, or use a measuring cup or jug - I've used a measuring cup this time, using 1 cup of batter per cake layer (I've learned that this works for my 6-inch tins through trial and error!) For this ombré cake, the first layer baked was the original colour of the batter (white). When doing the rainbow layer cake, I separate out all seven lots into bowls (pink, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue and purple) to colour, but for this one we can leave the batter in the same bowl and just keep adding colour to tint it darker as we go. I do two layers at a time simply because I have two 6 inch tins plus my tiny little oven will only fit two on the middle rack at one time.

For the vast majority of my colouring, be it cake batter, icing or vodka paint, I use Americolor gels. I love the little bottles, the little tops make dispensing so much easier than my old ones which were just plain jar type things. No mess, no clumping, no discovering later that I have had a bright green ring on my sleeve all afternoon simply because the colouring made its way from the jar to the lid to the bench to the mat and I happened to lean on that unfortunate spot. Locally, Spotlight and Your Habitat sell them, or you can find the entire range of 41 colours plus their food writing pens and airbrush colours here. I'm using Royal Blue in this case, but for my rainbow layer cakes I use Deep Pink, a mix of Super Red and Lemon Yellow for orange, Lemon Yellow, Mint Green, Sky Blue, Royal Blue and Electric Purple.

Add one drop of colouring at a time, to control the level of tint. If you're making an ombré cake, don't make the mistake of thinking you can add the same amount of colouring each time - remember the volume of cake batter is decreasing so adding the same amount of colouring will result in more intense and uneven colour.

Continue baking your layers until you're done, I like to make notes on them to keep the colours in order, this isn't as necessary when making a rainbow cake but doing the ombré thing means that sometimes the baked layers look so similar, I'd hate to mix them up and ruin the effect!

Next of course comes trimming and layering. Everyone has their own technique for this and has their preferred method, I seriously cannot go past my Agbay double blade leveller (found here) - I now have straight cuts and clean lines every time, the best money I've spent on cake gear! To go along with the white chocolate cake I used a white chocolate ganache for my filling and crumb coat.