How Do You Colour Cake Batter?

 How to make bright eye catching cake batter and bake them into bright eye catching sponge cakes!

A basic sponge mix is best for this purpose as you will need to beat the colour into the batter, if you make a genoese for example, the beating action will disperse all the air and you will end up with a brightly coloured biscuit!

Basic Sponge Cake Recipe

225g (8oz) Self Raising Flour
225g (8oz) Butter, at room temperature
225g (8oz) Caster Sugar
4 Eggs
1 tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Vanilla Essence

Method

Preheat oven 180C / gas mark 4 and line 2 x 8" round cake tins.
Mix all the ingredients together in one bowl then divide the batter into two.

Now you are ready to add your chosen colour, the brighter the better.

I've opted for orange and purple.

Add a teaspoon of colour before beating together until evenly distributed.

It is important to use bake stable food colour, this will ensure the colour you have chosen is the colour you will get.

Add the coloured batter to your prepared cake tins levelling with a spatula before baking for approximately 25 minutes.

Remove from the tins and allow to cool on a cooling rack.

You may think at this stage that the colour is not very bright, but don't be fooled, trim off the bake crust and "voila" fab intense colour, marvellous!

Piñata Cake With Surprises Inside!

This Piñata cake is packed with surprises, brightly decorated with multi coloured sponge layers to match and filled with yummy sweets. Kids love them!

I made this one for my 29 year old big kid and she and her friends loved it! Filled with their favourite sweets it's a great surprise, in my daughters case it was Dolly Mixtures, Skittles and M&Ms, but you can use any. It's more effective if they are out of the packet so that they tumble out of the cake as the first slice is cut!

For this cake I used a basic sponge recipe as gel colours needed to be added to the mixture which would require a good bit of mixing, if you use something like a genoese recipe you will end up beating all the air out.

Ingredients

225g (8oz) Self Raising Flour
225g (8oz) Butter, at room temperature
225g (8oz) Caster Sugar
4 Eggs
1 tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Vanilla Essence

Method

Mix all the ingredients together in one bowl, divide into 2 and colour each one differently.

I used Pink, Yellow, Green, Blue, Orange and Purple. You can fill two 8" lined and greased sandwich pans out of each batch so you will need to make 3 batches in total for 6 brightly coloured layers.

Make sure you use bake stable food colour to achieve a bright baked finish, in a gel or paste so it will not alter the consistency of the cake mixture.
Bake in a preheated oven at 180°c/ Gas mark 4 for approximately 15-25 minutes.

When cooled cut out the centre of 5 of the cakes and stack using butter cream, fill with you chosen sweets and add the last layer. Thinly coat the outside with butter cream.

Using your food colours from the sponge make 6 different coloured batches of butter cream and with a frill tube pipe from the bottom of the cake to the top and then into the centre, alternating colours as you go.
We got about 30 portions from this cake and they were generous! So you could get more!

If you would prefer to watch how this Piñata cake is made and decorated there will be a video following shortly.

Hope you enjoy making this cake, it's well worth the effort for the surprised and happy faces!
Let me know how you get on and what you filled yours with?

Sprinkles aren't just for sprinkling!

Fab & Fun Rainbow Sprinkles Cake!
This eye catching cake is oh so simple, all you need is sugar paste, sprinkles and edible glue.

After covering your cake with sugar paste, apply a thin layer of edible glue all over the surface and press the rainbow sprinkles on flat with your hands removing any excess. Placing it on a white covered cake drum emphasises the chaotic pattern of the sprinkles, as does having a plain white cake to set off the numbers. These are cut out of flower paste and left to dry before applying the glue and sprinkles in the same way.
It's advisable to keep patterns separated to avoid clashing of colour and design, complementing your creation.