Baking and Freezing the Smash Cakes - Ethan and Harley Turn 1! (4 day party countdown)

Today I baked Ethan and Harley's smash cakes to freeze, to defrost and decorate the day before the party.

Smash cakes are generally a colourful layered cake covered in buttercream, and usually in pastel colours, as when the babies 'smash' into the cake it looks so cute with the pastel coloured cake and buttercream all over their face, hands and clothes.

To go with the theme and my cute 2 boys, I decided to do a 4 layer blue ombre cake. I have made many pink ombre cakes as I've posted earlier, http://www.thermotwinning.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/pink-ombre-cake.html but have never made it in other colours, and I have only made them with a 20cm round baking tin. As I am making one for each of my boys, a 20cm cake to 'smash' into is way too big, so I used 13cm round baking tins which is a 'cuter' size for a 1 year old!

 

Blue Ombre Cake layers ready to freeze

(to decorate the day before the party)

With my previously baked pink ombre cakes, I used a butter cake recipe as the mixture is a great base to colour with the different shades of pink, and it is nice and dense to hold the buttercream. However, I wanted a cake which is lighter/fluffier for my boys little hands to get into and as the cake is much smaller than usual, it would not be so much of a worry with holding the buttercream if it was a lighter mixture.

Puritans Vanilla Cake by Serena:

http://cantstopbaking.com/tag/cant-stop-baking-vanilla-cake/

It is the first cake I have tried making with vegetable shortening (instead of butter/oil) and apparently that is the secret to getting a light and fluffy cake!

I need a total of 8 layers - 2 x white, 2 x baby blue, 2 x light blue, 2 x blue to create the 2 x blue ombre cakes. It is a pretty specific recipe so I made 1 x batch at a time (to divide into 4 cake layers).

It is no doubt one of the more complicated cake recipes I've ever read but she's made it very simply to make with the instructions recommending you pre weigh the ingredients in 7 separate bowls, so with each step you just add in whatever is in the pre prepared bowls:

Ingredients pre-prepared into 7 bowls

Once the cake mixture is made, I distributed the batter between 4 bowls and weighed them so it was evenly distributed 4 ways.

Cake batter weighed into 4 equal portions

 

I then coloured 3 of the bowls of batter into 3 varying shades of blue. I used Wiltons Gel Food Colour in Sky Blue. I just dipped a toothpick into the gel colouring bottle and mixed through the batter, adding a toothpick of gel colouring at a time to build up the colour.

Colouring 3 x batches of batter in varying shades of blue

(leaving 1 batch white)

I only have 2 x 13cm round cake tins, so I just baked 2 x colour batches of batter at a time.

 

Bake 1 x colour batch per 13cm tin

 

I baked the 2 x 13cm tins for 25 minutes at 180 degrees. Once the cakes were all baked, I let them cool and wrapped them to freeze like I did with my 'main cake' cakes I made a few days ago - http://www.thermotwinning.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/baking-and-freezing-cakes-ethan-and.html

 

 

Cakes to be cooled, and wrapped, to freeze in preparation for decorating