My Husband Makes an Ombre Cake

I LOVE Valentine's day - but I didn't love it so much when I was single.  Back as a single gal, I used to secretly hope that as I walked down the street on Feb. 14th,  some guy would ask me out! Needless to say, it only happened once.

I guess I enjoy Valentine's day because it's the day (besides anniversaries) we celebrate love in a BIG way.  Personally, I think love should be celebrated as often as possible - and with that said, let's talk about this post.  Lately I've been asking my husband to bake a cake.... but not just any cake - an Ombre cake.

So, I had to show him the many photos of ombre cakes featured on Pinterest & like a good sport, he was game!  Keep in mind, Mat loves to cook & teaches himself new recipes all the time, but this one was a definitely a challenge.  Either way, he made it for me today as one of my Valentine's treats. How cute is this??!??!  Some of you may also recall, two years ago on V-day - he also made me a cake, you can see the photos here.

I loved it so much I had to show you!  Below Mat take over the post & explain how he made this cake.  I'm impressed - aren't you?

 Ingredients:

1 stick (8 Tb) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 Tb teaspoons baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 large egg whites
1/2 C "milk" (soy or almond is fine)
1 tsp vanilla extract
Hot pink food coloring

Prep:

Preheat to 350 degrees. Beat butter and sugar in a mixing bowl for 5 minutes. Stir flour, baking powder and salt together in a separate bowl. Combine egg whites, milk and vanilla extract in another bowl. Add half of the dry mix to the butter mix, then half the milk mixture, and combine well with beater. Repeat, scraping bowl and beater often.

Prepare your pans. For this I used 4.5" non-stick springforms but you can use any type of pan. If it is not non-stick, you will need to grease it and use parchment to prevent sticking. Pour 3/4" deep of the mix into the baking pan and let settle. Carefully add food color to the remaining mix, 2 drops at a time blending completely so that the color never gets more than a few shades pinker. Pour 3/4" deep of the mix into a second pan. At this point, I had to bake them for 18 minutes, remove, and cool. Repeat the coloring each time you fill the pan and bake. Be sure to cut the puffed top off before layering the cake, and put a good dose of frosting between layers.

Frost with any good frosting - I recommend coloring a light shade of pink (about the same as the second or third layer). Buttercream is always a good choice but any frosting will do.

PS - if you don't want to go through the effort of scratch, you can use a box mix just as easily.

-images by jen ramos