Ombre Mr Penfold Cake

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I recently set myself a challenge of making the tackiest cake I could (without including edible glitter, don't get me started on that). I'm not normally one for overly decorated cakes as I feel they're just trying to compensate on the lack of flavour. Give me a 'rustic' looking walnut loaf any day over a red velvet layer cake with all the bells and whistles. But I have always secretly wanted to have a play around with gel food colouring and as pinterest calls it, an Ombre cake.

Last week was the opening for the All Type No Face exhibition and I agreed to make a cake. I had initially thought to make a typography cake by cutting letters out a a sheet of cake but as Tim's painting include quite a lot of fades I thought this would be the perfect solution. I took inspiration from the painting below and quickly set out making 4 batches of sponge cake. As I only have 2 cake tins I did these in 2 go's making a simple sponge consisting of 180g sugar, 180g unsalted butter, 3 large eggs, 180g flour, 2 tsp baking powder which then got split in half (weigh the total mixture and then divide evenly) before adding varying amounts of pink food dye. If you want to do this at home, these measurements are for a 9" tin but would also work for a smaller one if you were happy to have a taller cake, just watch the cooking times. To put the cake together I made up a simple buttercream using equal measures of softened butter & icing sugar. Once you've put all the layers together I recommend doing a 'crumb layer', which is a thin layer of icing over the whole cake that holds all the crumbs in place. If you pop the cake in the fridge for 15 minutes that will slightly set and will make putting the 2nd layer of icing much easier.

Finally, I used coloured royal icing which I rolled out thinly and Tim & I set about cutting a face for the character. This was a hardest past and made the perfectionist in me twitch, but I was pretty happy with the final result. Unfortunately for me, the cake was eaten in the blink of an eye so the only photo I managed to get was on my phone. Tim & I didn't even get to sample our creation in the end, but the feedback was pretty good.