I made this lovely ombre petal cake to celebrate my birthday this year. I baked two cakes in a 7 inch pan and filled them with a refreshing strawberry filling and a rich white chocolate ganache filling. The ‘petals’ are made of vanilla buttercream tinted in four shades of pink. It takes a while to create the petal effect but the end result is worth the time and effort. For the cake and fillings I will list all the ingredients but you can find step-by-step pictures and instructions in the How To’s section or by following the links below.

Time:  170 min, Prep: 120 min.  Cook: 50 min. (x2 if you don’t have two baking pans) + chilling time
Servings: 16-18

Ingredients:

For cake layers:

Follow this cake recipe to make the cakes. Use two 18 cm (7 inch) round pans instead of the 24.5 cm (9.6 inch) pan indicated in the recipe. Divide your batter between the two pans to bake 2 cakes. 

For strawberry filling:

• 300g strawberry yogurt, at room temperature
• 300g strawberries
• 4 Tbsp (1/3 cup) sugar
• 100g (1/2 cup) powdered sugar
• 28g unflavoured gelatin
• 400ml whipping cream, at room temperature

For white chocolate ganache filling:

• 100g white chocolate chips
• 100 ml whipping cream

For syrup to moisten cake:

• 200ml water
• 5 Tbsp sugar
• 1.5 Tbsp vanilla extract

For icing and cake decoration:

• 4 cups of vanilla buttercream icing
• Pink gel paste food colour
• 4 decorator bags fitted with a coupler or #12 tip – you could work without the couplers or tips as well, just use 4 disposable decorator bags and snip ½ inch off the tip of each bag.
• An angled spatula or a small teaspoon

Directions:

Make your cakes, the strawberry and white chocolate ganache fillings and the syrup (bring water and sugar to a boil and add vanilla extract).

Cut each cake horizontally in two.

Line the pans in which you baked the cakes with plastic foil. Place the first layer in the pan, moist it with sugar syrup and evenly cover the layer with half of the strawberry filling.

Place the second layer on top and moist it with sugar syrup. Cover with plastic foil and refrigerate for a few hours or overnight.  Follow the same steps for the second cake.

Remove cakes from pans and place the first cake on your cake board or stand. Spread the chocolate ganache over and place the second cake on top.

Crumb coat the cake with vanilla buttercream and let it set in the fridge.

Using pink food colour, tint the remaining buttercream to a light pink. Put a little less than ¼ of the buttercream in a decorator bag fitted with a coupler.

Add more colour to tint the remaining buttercream to a medium pink. Put about the same quantity as before in a decorator bag.

Add more colour to make a dark pink. Put ½ of the remaining buttercream in a decorator bag.

And lastly, add more colour to make an even darker pink buttercream and place in the last decorator bag.

For the ombre effect, pipe a vertical line of icing dots beginning at the bottom of the cake, starting with the darkest pink. I made two dots with the two darker colours and three dots with the two lighter colours.

Place the tip of the spatula or the teaspoon in the middle of the dot, press down and drag the icing to the right. Wipe your spatula with a paper towel when needed.

Repeat this process around the cake and on top of the cake. Use the lighter colours to make rings around the edge on top of the cake and the darker colour in the middle.  To make the last line just pipe each dot and carefully drag it as far as you can without disturbing the next dot. Or you could just leave the dots as they are since they won’t be as noticeable.