A Neon Tie-Dye Surprise Cake That Will Knock 'Em Dead
Hungry Happenings, Hungry Happenings
Peace, love, understanding — and cake? If you're baking for a Jerry Garcia fan, a preschooler who adores arts and crafts, or just someone who likes colorful surprises, you may find inspiration in this super-cool psychedelic, rainbow tie-dye cake with an unexpected twist, created for Tablespoon.com by Hungry Happenings blogger Beth Jackson Klosterboer. (Beth credits this tie-dye Peace Cake by Sandra Denneler, of Handmade Charlotte, as inspiration.)
The list of ingredients is pretty simple: four boxes of pound cake mix (it's less susceptible to air bubbles than regular cake mix), eggs, butter, milk, neon food coloring, 28 ounces of fondant in whatever colors appeal to you, and store-bought frosting. And you'll need two 6-inch x 6-inch x 2-inch baking pans, and a fair number of disposable pastry or Ziploc bags. (For the full tutorial, click here.)
You'll also need to allot a fair amount of time to create it — much of it's spent waiting for the cakes (you'll be making two of them) to bake and cool. Nine hours, total. So you might want to block out a day when you don't have much else going on and you're in the mood to put on some jam-band tunes and chill out with some groovy baking. (You can pass the baking time by reading through this Deadspin story about the "comment apocalypse" an instructional post about this very rainbow cake has spawned on an Australian radio station website. It's unreal.) Hungry Happenings also offers a simpler, one-cake version here.
The first cake is a crazy swirl of different-color batter, which you can then cut — in sections, with cookie cutters — into whatever shapes you want: letters, holiday shapes or numbers. Hungry Happenings shaped its multi-colored cake into festive number 5s, in honor of Tablespoon's fifth birthday. Sandra used a peace-sign cookie cutter to make her Peace Cake.
The colorful cutouts are then lined up and baked inside a second, uncolored external cake. Then the fondant is twisted, swirled and rolled into a marbleized outer tie-dye layer. Hungry Happenings topped its cake with rainbow candles.
Sandra employed a slightly different method to create her cake and went with a simple white frosting. "At first glance, this Peace Cake might not seem like a 'piece of cake' to create," Sandra wrote. "But I've simplified the process so that you can achieve sweet success in your own kitchen."
Cut into these cakes for a reveal that will, like, totally blow their minds. Your favorite Deadhead will be so grateful!