{Adventures In} Ombre' Mini Cakes

My best friend of 20+ years is getting married this summer and her bridal shower is quickly approaching. It's up to the other bridesmaids and I to throw her an ah.maze.ing shower. And since I'm seriously loving the ombre' look that is everywhere right now, so why not make that the "theme" to her shower? I took to the internet and found a great tutorial here and decided to try my hand at making purple ombre' mini cakes. How did I do?

Pretty stinkin' cute, right?! 

These guys are not easy to make. Super cute in the end, but it takes a lot to get here. 

Ingredients:

1 box cake mix (I used vanilla)

1 container of frosting (I used vanilla)

Purple food coloring (I used Duff Electric Food Coloring) 

Equipment:

Hand Mixer

Round Cake Pans (I used 8" rounds)

4 small bowls 

Cookie Cutter (Roughly 3" round)

Directions:

Prepare cake mix according to the directions shown on the box. Split batter into 4 small bowls evenly. (Roughly 1 cup per bowl). 

Apply food coloring into each bowl starting with the darkest color first. I applied roughly 14 drops of purple food coloring into the first bowl, 5 in the second bowl, 2 in the third bowl and 1 in the fourth bowl (making it the lightest) . 

For some reason the pictures I take on my "good" camera are not true in color. Weird. 

Coat the cake pans in butter/shortening/whatever. Since I only have two - 8" round cake pans, I had to bake the batter in two batches. This wasn't as time consuming as I thought it would be because it only took 10 minutes to bake each batch.

Once your batches are done, place on a cooling rack and wait. Now comes the more difficult part (at least for me).

In order to make sure that your layers are straight, you have to make sure that your cake is level. I tried. I failed. I definitely need some practice. Once I felt that my layers were level enough, I began to construct the mini cakes. Starting with the darkest layer on the bottom, I added piped frosting in between all four layers. Until I got this:

Definitely not perfect. But still cute.

So, now that's it's done and it's somewhat of a success will I do it for her bridal shower? Not sure. I will need to make roughly 20 of these guys and since there is no frosting on the outside of the mini cake, it will dry out quickly. Like within minutes. I have a couple of months to perfect it, so who knows. I can always make ombre' cupcakes instead. :)