Bake: a Unicorn Cake

I rarely bake because 1) I’m not a fan of sweets; 2) I won't produce something I won’t eat; and 3) hubs is much better at baking than I am. However, I do love a creative project and had been wanting to bake a unicorn or rainbow cake, which I'd been seeing all over on Pinterest and YouTube, and so I offered to do so for a birthday party. I wasn’t going to bake from scratch, and really all a cake box mix is pre-measured flour, sugar, baking powder, and baking soda. I used two boxes of white cake mix to which I added water, oil, and egg whites. Each box makes a little over 3 cups of cake batter (easy peasy math)—1 cup of cake batter per layer, each a different color.  

I considered my first layer more dark pink than red, and so I added even more red food coloring to my sixth layer rather than bake a blue layer. Baking this cake was fun. Pour a cup of batter into my Pyrex measuring cup, squeeze 4 drops of food color into the batter, blend with a tiny whisk, and then pour into the parchment-lined and cooking oil-sprayed cake pan before popping into a 350 degree oven for 13 to 15 minutes until done. 

I frosted between layers very thinly because I didn’t want the cake too sweet, but I did sprinkle confetti between layers. In retrospect, I wish I had reserved the sprinkles for outside the cake.

And the next day, I decorated the cake. As a beginner, I just went with using three different sized star tips. But first I mixed up four different colors of pink, light green, peach and lavender icings to frost the outside edge and top of the cake, aiming for an ombré of these pastels. 

             

And then I just piped large, medium and tiny stars of these colors to mimic the mane and attempted to pipe a big rose star at the top of its head, but gravity pulled it down lopsided. Oh well, go with it because I wasn’t gonna scrape it off and do it again. Not enough time as the birthday party was already starting. Yeah the confetti sprinkles would've looked better at the base of the cake to hide bare spots in the frosting. Next time! Instead I stuck the plastic eyelashes, ears, crown and horn.  And 3 candles for the 3 birthday women.                   

Everyone commented how cute and that the rose in the forehead looked like a nose.

And lastly a shot of the cake slice. And no I wasn’t able to eat all of my slice which was way too sweet for me. But I would love to bake this cake again next year for Pride Month or the other variations with the cake decorations like a Frog Prince or Narwhal or Mermaid cake.