Summertime Birthday Cake

After recently making a big oreo decorated cake for my sister I wanted to make another of my sisters a fun birthday cake, and make a bit more summery. After scrolling for drip cake ideas on Pinterest I saw 'funfetti' cakes where you make a vanilla sponge and add coloured sprinkles to the mix. After unsuccessfully finding enough bright coloured sprinkles I decided I would just use them for decoration and instead make an ombre cake. Follow these steps if you want to know how to make it :) 

1.  Using a plain vanilla sponge cake recipe, make enough (probably double the amount) to fill four 8 inch cake tins. Split the mixture into four bowls and using food colouring of your choice, add a lot to one and then add a smaller amount to the next and so on. The last bowl should be so pale that it's almost normal cake mix colour.

2. Once the cake is cooked and cooled (making sure you know what order you take them out in), make butter icing for the layers. For this I use unsalted butter, icing sugar, a drop of milk and vanilla extract. Layer the cakes and in between each one add butter icing spreading evenly with a palette knife.

3. Cover the outside of the cake with a thin layer of the butter icing and leave to dry slightly. This makes adding more icing easier and less inclined to get cake crumbs in.  

4. Add more, and then with a separate bowl of butter icing add rainbow coloured sprinkles and spread evenly around the sides of the cake.

5. Melt white chocolate and add pink food colouring together and put into a piping bag with a very small hole. Start by going around the edge of the cake making drips, then smooth the remainder of the chocolate on the top. Once slightly cooled, add more sprinkles.

6. Using this nozzle, pipe around the base of the cake with the plain coloured butter icing.

7. Add green food colouring to butter icing and pipe onto the top of the cake using the nozzle below. Do the same with pink - I made these slightly smaller than the green. You could add as many as you wanted.

For the final touch add different sprinkles over all the icing.

♥