Raspberry and White Chocolate Ombré cake

This is (indirectly) practically an homage to the two male GBBO winners; Edd Kimber and John Whaite.

But as it's my mum's birthday, it's just another excuse to bake cake. And I've wanted to make this type of cake for months. I've pinned loads on Pinterest.

There's two different ways of making an ombré cake. Most people know of an ombré cake as being different grading colours of sponge. But this one is with different colours of icing instead.

I came across the sponge recipe when I was googling raspberry sponges as my mum adores raspberries. It's basically a simple sponge with white chocolate and raspberries added. Note: to make this an ombré cake as I did, you need 3 sponges so you need to increase the quantities.

Raspberry and white chocolate cake:

200g butter/margarine

100g milk chocolate 

200g caster sugar 

4 eggs

200g self raising flour

175g raspberries

Preheat the oven to 180/160c fan. Line two 8" cake tins.

Place the butter and chocolate in a bowl over simmering water and stir every so often until melted and combined. Leave to cool a few minutes then whisk in the eggs and caster sugar. Mix in the flour (the recipe said the raspberries too but I didn't yet). It's a very loose mixture, so pour carefully into your tins and scatter in the raspberries.(I left them until this stage so I could evenly add them and space them out).

Bake for 25 minutes until a skewer comes out clean. 

You can then fill the cake with white chocolate ganache (as per original recipe) but I filled mine with raspberry jam and whipped cream, then set about the next stage.

Buttercream:

250g butter

500g icing sugar 

1 tbsp milk 

Cream together the icing sugar and butter then mix in the milk. Using only a little of the buttercream, crumb coat your stacked and filled cakes and place into the fridge to set.

Choose the colour you want your cake to be then add a small amount of food colouring (I use gels) to the rest of the buttercream until you have a light shade of the colour. Remove a third and put into an icing bag. If you have three 10cm tips, then use them. I didn't so just snipped a hole off the end.

Add a bit more food colouring until you have a darker shade. Remove half and put into an icing bag. Then colour the last bit with more colouring until you have a dark shade and put into an icing bag.

Then basically follow this tutorial:

http://youtu.be/jtGaOcXYmHA

Start by piping a dot of the lightest colour at the bottom, two dots above this of the medium shade, then two dots of the darkest shade then one dot of the light shade. Then take a spatula or small teaspoon and drag across the icing, cleaning after each colour.

Keep going on to the next row and add two light, two medium and two dark. It's best to have a photo of how you want the cake to look as one wrong move and you have to remove the icing very gently indeed!

Once you get all the way round, finish by just piping dots to join up. 

Then you can start on the top. You could always just add one block colour and not ice this way but I decided to do the top as well. Take the darkest colour and pipe a dot, smear then pipe and continue. Then take the medium colour and do the same. Then the light colour and keep going until you've no room left and fill with one dot of colour 

Finished! Ok so it takes more time than slapping on some buttercream or ganache (45 minutes to ice!) but it l think it looks lovely for an occasion. 

You can also use lots of different colours to make a rainbow cake, or just one colour would make a lovely elegant cake.