This homemade white vanilla funfetti cake with butter cream frosting is the easiest DIY birthday cake that you can make. Rustic, easy and homely.
My son turned one this July and I was pretty clear I wanted to bake him his cake. I have been making eggless dessert cakes for him for all his month birthdays that we celebrated (yeah we celebrated every month on the 28th). The pediatrician we consulted that time insisted not to have any form of egg (or non-vegetarian item, for that matter) in his food! [I bit weird, I felt]. So this is the first full-fledged real cake that he had. This was also his smash cake. And it was gone in no time!
I am not very good at cake decorating. I haven’t actually made too many birthday cakes – the ones with frosting. But still I wanted to go ahead and do an ombré effect with the frosting. I must also mention at this point I am not quite a fan of fondant cakes. I find them extremely sweet (even though I have a major MAJOR sweet tooth) and dry.
I decided to go ahead with making a vanilla butter-cream frosting with some food colors. Since Bluey was going to have this cake I escaped the chocolate or artificial flavor route. It’s natural vanilla-butter-sugar-egg-flour. That’s it nothing else in the cake – oh yes it has those sugar sprinklies for the added funfetti.
This is the easiest birthday cake you can make at home even if you are a first timer with baking and frosting.
Now you must have already realized, this was not made for the blog, so I have random photos of the cake. I also forgot to click the insides after the cake was cut because we were too busy smashing! So I guess it’s okay if there are little less photos once!
Assembling the cake
I have told you earlier I bake my cakes in a convectional microwave. This birthday cake is a tall cake. I have made cake batter for three tins. The ombre effect looks good on a tall cake. if you have an oven use three baking pans and you can bake all the three at once. But since mine doesn’t have racks, I have baked three pans individually. So it’s a longer process for me. I baked the cakes at night and let them cool over night and frosted in the morning.
Pro Tip: Always let the cake cool down completely before frosting. Else the butter cream will melt.
Cake Topper
I made this little banner with my son’s name – Armaan is Bluey’s good name BTW- and tied to two cake pop sticks with some wool. It’s just yellow post-its, sketch pens and some wool. I used a cute little first birthday candle as the cake topper.
Ombre Frosting
If you are into Pinterest then you might just absolutely get crazy with the amount of inspiration available for cake frosting – royal icing, butter cream, whipped cream – every damn thing. I too got inspired to try some ombre frosting. It’s nothing but introducing colors in smooth transitions.
The only good gel food color that I have is a dark blue one, so I made 5 shades of blue butter cream frosting, from darker blue to palest blue and some general white vanilla frosting.
I originally had an idea of creating blue ruffles around the cake but then I realized i didn’t have 5 ruffle piping nozzles! So I simply smeared with a knife to create some rough edges. So it’s nothing very fancy that you would see on Pinterest. But it’s made with lot of love and the little man was very happy.
- For Vanilla Cake
- All Purpose Flour – 3 cups, sifted
- Baking powder – 1 tablespoon
- Salt – a pinch
- Unsalted butter – 1 cup at room temperature
- Sugar – 1 and 3/4th cup
- Egg – 4, whole eggs, at room temperature
- Vanilla – Extract of 2 vanilla pods
- Milk – 1 cup, whole milk, at room temperature
- Funfetti sprinklies – 1/3rd cup
- For Ombre Butter Cream Frosting
- Confectioner’s Sugar / Icing Sugar – 4 cups, sifted well
- Unsalted Butter – 1 cup
- Vanilla – Extract of 1 vanilla pod
- Cream – 4 tablespoon of light cream or whole milk
- Food color – blue
- Funfetti sprinklies – 2 teaspoons
- Read more: http://www.joyofbaking.com/VanillaCake.html#ixzz4KOHWJzGb
- Follow us: @joyofbaking on Twitter | joyofbaking on Facebook
- Pre-heat oven at 180C/350F
- Grease 3 round 6 inch baking tins with butter/cooking spray
- Line the bottom of the pans with a parchment paper/ baking sheet and grease them again with cooking spray/ butter
- Sift together flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl
- Cream butter and sugar together with a hand mixer or stand mixer for 3-5 minutes or till it becomes fluffy
- Break eggs and add one at a time mixing well in between
- Scrape the insides of vanilla pods and add while beating the batter well
- Now add flour mix and milk alternatively in the order of flour – milk- flour-milk-flour till it is incorporated well.
- Use a silicon spatula at this stage and fold in the flour.
- Add the funfetti sprinklies and fold
- Rest the batter for 15-20 mins
- Divide the batter in three tins equally and bake in a pre-heated oven at 180C/350F for 30 minutes or till a tooth pick entered in the center comes out clean
- Cool the cakes on a wire rack till they are completely cool. Else frosting will melt.
- Cream butter with a hand mixer or stand mixer for 1-2 minutes till it’s light and creamy
- Add in the vanilla extract and beat well
- Gradually add icing sugar, in small quantities at a time – if you pour the entire icing sugar at once you will end up with a face full of icing sugar!
- Scrape down the sides as you beat the sugar
- Add 2 table spoon of cream / milk and beat on low speed for 2 minutes
- Add 2 more tablespoons of cream / milk and beat on high speed for 2 minutes or till its light and fluffy
- Divide frosting in 4-5 bowls
- Add drops of blue color in 4 bowls – 3 drops for the darkest color and gradually reducing the food color amount
- Smear the white frosting between each layer on the entire cake – it’s called crumb coating
- With a flat knife / spatula spread layers of color frosting starting with the darkest color at the base and gradually working up till the lightest color.
- Keep the top on the cake white
- Sprinkle some funfetti sprinklies on top on the edges.
- Create small dots of the darkest color at the base to hide the edges
- Use any cake topper to finish the cake.
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This cake is adorable. I Love the flag ad everything. My daughter is 4 and I have always made al her b’day cakes.There’s really no other way to keep.the cake healthy for the little ones.
This is Pinterest worthy😊
Aww thank you so much. The appreciation means a lot. Yeah I hope to bake many more till he starts demanding something else!
The cake looks amazing. I haven’t tried butter cream frosting yet. This should be fun!
The cake looks amazing. I haven’t tried butter cream frosting yet. This should be fun!
Yeah buttercream frosting is very tasty I love it. Thanks for dropping by
Looks incredible, love the flag! I haven’t tried butter cream frosting yet! This time for sure will give a try. Belated Birthday wishes to Armaan
Thanks Rashmi. Buttercream tastes much better than a fondant. You can give it a try. Thanks for dropping by
Tina, The cake looks so amazing and yummy. I can see the efforts gone into making it. Baking is still a difficult thing for me.
Tina..the cake is beautiful and I am sure super yummy..I love baking and always look out for interesting and easy recipes..will give this one a try too 🙂
My recent post- http://kreativemommy.com/meet-strong-mom-deepa-malik/
This cake looks yum and recipe too sounds doable!
Cheers
Tina , Please post with pic step by step process of icing n which whipped cream should I use my cake turns soft but icing is disaster 🙁
Oh my , you are such a talented woman! I wish to make one.. may be I will try to make a simple one 😀
I have never baked because I dunno how to. But I love to admire the talented people like you who not only dare to bake but put up such lovely recipes. Simply wow!!
If this is your first effort at frosting a cake my friend, I’d love to see what you can do with a little practice! This looks almost professional. And from reading through the recipe, I think it must have turned out absolutely delicious!
Wow 🙂
Next time parcel me please 🙂
Looking too delicious !!
Lol. Thanks for dropping by Sam
Aah! Donno much about decoration and all, what matters the most to me is the taste 😀 and it definitely looks like a show-stealer. And cake every month on 28th- Ahmazing! 🙂
Thank you Saumy. Keep coming back, hope to keep you guys delighted always
you even gave it an Ombre shade!! wow… where do you learn all this stuff… anyway it’s beyond me. Looks awesome as always 😀
Lol. Pinterest is the place for all these kind of inspiration. Originally had planned to do something even fancier with the ombre but realised I didn’t have everything for that
It looks so damn lovely man, I wanna give it a try Tina though am a pathetic cook.
Your recipes though coax me a lot.
Give it a try Roma. There’s nothing difficult in my recipes
I’m sure you will be able to pull it off
looks so yummy hats off
Thank you Manisha for the appreciation and for dropping by
Tina, every time I come here, I end up wandering in my kitchen, searching for some treats…..your posts always trigger super hunger pangs! Lovely cake for little Bluey! Love the ombre effect!
Thank you so much Kala. Sometimes hunger pangs are good.
I can never do that Tina, really I find it difficult to do the icing,,,your pics are so nice and inviting. so nice!!
tempting pics & yummy recipe
will surely try 🙂
the only thing i can do is eat it….making this kind of super cake is a dream 🙂 loved it Tina 🙂
Thanks Shweta, for the longest time I too was only interested in eating a cake, but being on your own teaches quite a lot
Cake with butter cream frosting. Now that’s something I never knew about. And the cake looks nothing but delicious :D.