Pink Lemonade Ombre Cake with Pink Lemonade Cream Cheese Frosting

It is a bit early but I just had to post a blog of Kenzie’s birthday cake.

Okay…technically it isn’t her ‘birthday” birthday cake.

This is the cake I made for the family dinner we had to celebrate her 16th birthday. Sue and I will be doing a post in a week or so of Kenzie’s REAL birthday. Sue is going all out for Kenz’s big 1-6 and I get to help! Be sure to check back after June 28th to see some party and food pics!

For now though…. I wanted to make something really “girly” and pink for Kenz. I decided on a pink lemonade cake. Then I decided to up it a notch and do an ombre cake, just to see if I could.

I got the recipe from Better Homes and Gardens Magazine but did make a few little changes.

Pink Lemonade Cake with Pink Lemonade Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients

Cake

3 1/3 cup flour

1 Tbsp baking powder

Pinch salt

1 cup butter, room temp

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

Red food coloring

1 1/3 cups milk

¼ cup pink lemonade concentrate

1 tsp lemon extract

Frosting

½ cup butter, room temp

1 cup cream cheese, room temp

1 cup marshmallow creme (or fluff)

¼ cup pink lemonade concentrate

Red food coloring

4 cups icing sugar

Directions

Preheat oven to 350. Lightly spray 2 X 9 inch pans with cooking spray. (I also like to line the bottom of my pans with parchment paper and give them another quick spray.) Set aside.

In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, salt. Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat butter until creamy. Gradually add sugar and beat until well combined, scraping sides of bowl as you go. Beat in 1/8 tsp food coloring. Beat in eggs, one at a time, until well combined.

In a small bowl, stir together milk, pink lemonade concentrate, and lemon extract. (Mixture will appear curdled)

Alternately add flour mixture and milk mixture to the butter mixture, beating until combined. Divide batter in half. To half of the mixture add another 1/8 tsp food coloring.

Varying the pinkness.

Scrape into prepared pans. Bake at 350 for about 30 – 35 minutes. (Until toothpick inserted near center comes out clean.) Remove from oven and let cool in pans for 5 minutes before inverting onto wire rack to cool completely.

Frosting - Beat the butter and cream cheese until fluffy. Beat in marshmallow cream. Add pink lemonade concentrate and food coloring and beat until combined. Very slowly add the icing sugar until you reached spreading consistency. You made to add more or less concentrate or icing sugar to get it where you want it.

Now…in my head I imagined this being a really small cake and I wanted to make a BIG cake…so…I doubled the recipe. Hmmmmm… yeah…..I got a big cake. I needed 5 cake pans. I only used 4 layers for her cake and it was ginormous. I just repeated the above steps twice and then added more food coloring the second time around to get deeper pink colors. I think I doubled the frosting too.

You can see the layers are cut in half. I changed my mind about icing all 8 layers and just went with 4 iced layers.

I initially cut each layer in half and was going to frost between each of the layers so it would be an 8 layer cake…but then decided it may be too sweet with all that icing between the layers and such and just went with 4 big layers. (In hindsight, I think it may have looked even cooler if I had done the 8 layers… but it was still pretty cool.)

I couldn't get it smooth....aaaarg!

 I couldn’t decide how I wanted to finish off the frosting. Initially I was hoping to get it nice and smooth...

but that didn’t work….so then I was going to cover it in fake flowers…but that looked terrible…so then Sue suggested making it fluffy by lightly stabbing it all over with a fork. I think the end result looked really cool. It almost looked like it was covered in coconut. We did leave some fake flowers around the bottom though just to fancy it up. Do you like the plate it is on? Nice, right? I got that for 50 cents at a garage sale.

Yay!

I thought it turned out really pretty. Kenzie was happy with it so that was the most important thing.

FYI – only double this if you need a really, really BIG cake. We fed 20 people at her dinner, left ¼ of it for the restaurant staff, and I brought ¼ of to work the next day.

Kenzie with her "small piece" piece of birthday cake. Hehehe - it doesn't even fit on the plate!

I hope you come back at the end of the month and check out Kenzie’s birthday party pics and food ideas. Her theme is purple, black, and white. (UPDATE: Click here to see party pics!)

Head over to My Turn (for us) for more great ideas.

Don't forget about Heatherly Loves!