Pink Rosette Ombre Cake

This is one of my favorite cakes that I have made. I love the ombre look, and the rosettes are simple, yet elegant.  The inspiration for this cake came from Ross Sveback.  The recipe and instructions were posted in the Minneapolis, MN Star Tribune News Paper prior to Valentine's Day.

Start by mixing your cake batter.  Depending on how many layers you want your cake to be, remove part of the batter.  Add food coloring to remaining batter.  Remove another portion of the batter.  Add more food coloring and remove more of the batter.  Continue this pattern until you have the batter divided into enough portions to bake as many cake layers as you want.

Here is an example of how your batter should look.  Each layer should be slightly darker than the previous layer.

Mix the frosting for your cake and color the frosting in the same way that you did for the cake batter.

Bake all of the cake layers.  Here are the results of the different colored cake layers.

Stack the cakes and dirty frost to hold in all of the crumbs.

Using a 1M decorating tip and the darkest color frosting create rosettes around the bottom of the cake.

 Continue creating rosettes using the 1M tip, using lighter shades of

frosting as you go towards the top of the cake.

This is what the final cake should look like.  Both the cake layers inside and the frosting on the outside should go from a dark to light shade of color.  This is a very elegant look and simple to create.  Try it out!

4-0

Happy 40th birthday to my cousins Amy & Ryan! 

Here are some pics of the cake I made for their birthday celebration. 

I started by making two 6" and two 8" round cakes and leveling them with a knife.

Then I filled the cakes with a homemade chocolate ganache and buttercream icing.

Next I iced the cakes.

I recruited my husband to help roll out the fondant.

Once the fondant was rolled, I covered both of the cakes.

I then cut off the extra fondant and smoothed out the bumps.

For the decorations I used these black Wilton Sugar Sheets.  I found these at Michaels and they come in a variety of colors. 

It was super easy to use and looks really nice on the cake.  To start I peeled the sugar sheet off the plastic.

I then used a cutting board (a clean one, of course) to cut black strips for the cake.

Once the strips were cut, I used a paint brush to brush each strip with water so it would stick to the cake.

After brushing the strips with water, I placed them one by one onto the bottom layer of the cake.

After the bottom layer of the cake was decorated, I stacked the smaller layer on top.

I rolled white balls of fondant to use as the border around the top layer of the cake.  I used a little bit of frosting to hold them in place. 

For the top layer of the cake, I used a knife to cut 4s and 0s from the black sugar sheets.  I added rolled white fondant balls to the top of the cake and added the fun, twirly wires with hanging jewels to the top of the cake.  You can find the wires and jewels at Michaels also.  I think they make a fun addition to any cake.