Mini Egg Ombre Pinata Cake

Making something very elaborate for a bake off at work is hard when you have to finish it on a weeknight after work and transport it by train and bus into the office. I thought about making essentially the same cake as last year's winning entry again, but with mini eggs – I still intend to do this, but thought it was a bit of a cop-out for the bake off as it was really just the same thing I’d done last time. As I won last time I also thought the judges wouldn’t award first prize to the same cake again – forgetting that last time the bake off was a departmental one, and this time was sort of company-wide (being held in 4 of our largest offices at the same time), with different judges who wouldn’t have seen my malteser cake!
 

By the time I’d remembered that I’d already decided to make something else though, that didn’t actually take that long to make and wouldn’t be too fragile to transport. I came across a brilliant Easter ombre piñata cake on Taming Twins, and essentially just copied that. So I’m not going to reproduce Sarah’s recipe and instead suggest you hop on over to her site; she’s even done a video showing you just how you get the mini eggs inside.

I did take a few photos as I went along the way, so you can see how the cake came together and how I coloured each layer.

Adding food colouring to the cake batter and baking each layer:

Make a hole in two layers of cake cutting around something like a glass or an egg cup

Place a complete layer of cake on the bottom, spread with buttercream, then do the same with the two layers with holes in, and pour Cadbury Mini Eggs into the hole until the top is level. Then place the fourth complete layer of cake on top, with more buttercream in between each layer.

I mixed the same three colours (as one layer of the sponge is its natural colour) with some buttercream and spread it around the side of the cake, one colour at a time. It doesn't matter if the layers of icing are that neat, because you then take a spatula and spread the buttercream so it's even, blending the edges into each other.

Finally I put the cake on a board I had covered with fondant, where I'd stuck a yellow polka-dot ribbon around the edge which I bought from Fantastic Ribbons, which I thought was quite appropriate for Easter. I then spooned my remaining buttercream on top and fixed on a little heap of Mini Eggs.

I didn't know what the inside was going to look like until the judges at the bake off cut it open, so it was quite nerve-racking. It looked great the Mini Eggs spilled out and the other bakers were very impressed. However, the judges said I hadn't used enough buttercream between each layer which made the cake a bit dry, so I didn't win this time. I will have to come up with something better for the bake-off next year….

I'm sharing this with Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabber UK, as her theme this month is Sport Relief and this cake was made for a Sport Relief bake sale.

I'm also sending it to Simply Eggcellent, hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen; the cake uses quite a lot of eggs and of course the Mini Eggs are the star!

Another challenge I can enter this in is Tea Time Treats, hosted by Jane at the Hedgecombers and Karen at Lavender and Lovage, as their theme this month is Easter and Spring.

And finally because it's Easter, I'm sending this to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen.