Valentines Cake-Sweet Layers of Pink
I love making desserts for Valentine’s Day. Primarily, it’s because I just love the colors this special celebration elevate. Pink and red just shouts love, joy, and happiness, doesn’t it? This Valentines Cake fits the bill!
New Idea
Wanting to try something new this year for a special dessert, I took those traditional colors and decided to incorporate them into a cake loaded with my favorite vanilla buttercream.
Fun with Layers
The cake is layered with multicolored layers of pink and red cake. These layers are then stacked on top of each other offering a exciting surprise upon serving.
Instead of the traditional round cake, this cake is rectangular and garnished with a jeweled ribbon to give it a bit of glam.
Cake and Icing
Cake: You can use your favorite cake recipe of vanilla or yellow. Also, you can also use a box mixed too. All these options work super well with this technique.
Icing: Your favorite buttercream or icing recipe. Chocolate would work too.
Materials
- Cake recipe
- Icing
- Wilton colors of pink, rose, red
- Piping bags
- 2 cookie sheet pans- 1/4 pans (half of a regular cookie sheet)
- Parchment paper
- Decorations of your choice
Making the Cake Layers
Start with your favorite cake recipe and mix as directed.
Divide the cake batter equally into three bowls. You can weigh each bowl to be super accurate or just eye ball it.
I color each bowl of icing with the pink and red shades till I get the color I like which is the center piece of color to this Valentines Cake!
I put each color into a piping bag and line my baking sheets with parchment paper, greased. I use two 1/4 baking sheets. These are half the size of a regular baking sheet.
Place your baking sheet horizontally and pipe vertical lines of batter down 1/3 of the baking sheet. Do this on each baking sheet.
Then repeat this with the other two colors till you have a full baking sheet piped with three colors total. Each color makes up 1/3 of the baking sheet.
The cakes are baked and cooled.
Assembling the Cake
Once the cake is cooled, I cut down vertically each section of the cake colors separating them into three pieces for each baking sheet. I have a total of 6 cake layers: 2 red, 2 pink, and 2 rose.
Prepared my favorite buttercream icing or really, any icing will do. I had some leftover pink buttercream and I used it here.
On a cake board, I start making the layers by placing a layer of cake and then adding icing in a smooth layer on top of the cake.
This is then topped with another layer of cake and icing and I keep repeating till I have used all the cake layers and have my last layer on top.
I rotate the colors as I place the layers together so I use a different color every time I layer to get that impressive look.
At the end, you will have a rectangle cake with 6 layers of cake and 5 layers of icing. Don’t worry if it doesn’t look even. I usually will give it a nice trim with a serrated knife to make sure all the sides are even.
This will make frosting the cake a breeze.
Decorating Valentines Cake
Its time to have some fun and unleash your creativity. Sometimes I’m not sure how I will end up decorating cakes until I actually start applying the icing. I guess it’s one of those things where I depend on creativity to surface.
Crumb Coat
Firstly, I apply a crumb coat of icing and refrigerate the cake till firm. Then apply the final icing layer and decorative touches.
Cake Ribbon
I had some of this really neat jeweled cake ribbon from a cake show I attended and thought it would match perfectly with the theme. It’s super easy to apply, it adheres nicely to the wet icing.
Just unroll it and adhere it to the bottom of the cake wrapping it all around the circumference then cut the end to fit.
Sky is the Limit
You can decorate this Valentines Cake with any style, there is not wrong way here. Put your own touch and spin on it.
Use different piping techniques. I used the shell on the sides and rosettes on the sides and top to complete the cake.
I love the chocolate covered colored sixlets that make for a nice finished garnish, that is if there are any left after snacking on them.
The valentine heart sprinkles are a perfect touch for this cake and I sprinkled some of those on top.
The Best Part
Now its time to slice into the cake and see all those awesome layers. To me that was the best part! I like the way the vanilla buttercream looks with the pink and red colored layers.
The white buttercream allows the layers to really pop!!!
Here are some more ideas for Valentines goodies:
