Doing the Ombre

As I was saying, it's a Rainbow week. One of the cakes is for Eve of thebottomsupblog.com  and she's been eyeing a rainbow cake for a while so her hubby's birthday was the perfect excuse for one. She requested for the layers between to have enough white frosting for the rainbow layers to stand out. Here's an amazing pic she sent me for an example.

Now I usually use cream cheese frosting, which doesn't give that distinct frosting layer but it's just enough to separate the colours. And although cream cheese starts out white, it somehow becomes pale yellow after whipping with sugar and some cream or butter. Still, it really taste the best among all the frostings.

However, for this purpose, I was going to abandon the cream cheese and try to make a super white frosting. I know I can achieve this with traditional buttercream made solely with shortening and icing sugar but it's just something I personally won't make - shortening is not the healthiest thing and it taste really synthetic. So I turned to my trusty meringue frosting (or fluffy boiled frosting). Made from meringue powder (egg white) and boiled sugar, it's whipped into a heavenly light marshmallow cloud that is perfect to achieve the above look. Unfortunately it didn't hold the layers as well as I would have like it to as it was a much softer frosting than buttercream or cream cheese.

Meringue frosting between layers

We were discussing how to decorate this cake when I suggested an idea to Eve. I've been wanting to try my hand at an Ombre cake – something that I came across while looking at the many baking blogs for inspiration. She liked the idea and off to work I went.

Ombre in the making

The textured look

Ombre means the multiple hues of the same shade of colour. It's a lovely technique that looks stunning and almost seems like a monochrome rainbow. I used cornflower blue for this ombre and made 3 shades of this blue finishing with the white. There's a great tutorial from thehungryhousewife.com that shows a step by step method on achieving this look. It's my first attempt and it was not as difficult as it looks at all.

Here's the completed cake...

Happy Birthday Alf

Sadly, I was told the cake had slid during transportation and the frosting was somewhat ruined :(  I'm going to work on the cream frosting again for better holding power and maybe I should also deliver this cake myself. Nonetheless, I hope the rainbow inside made up for it.