For my little B’s 1st birthday (in January) I made his my own version of a layer smash cake. I’m not into making fancy decorated cakes for a one year old, who doesn’t even care anyway and just smashes the sucker to pieces. But I did have to make him his own cake. I went with a multi-layered boy cupcake cake.
I was inspired by all the rainbow layered cakes out there, but changed it up to “boy” colors, according to my little G man.
You can find lots of tutorials out there, but here is what I did for my “Leaning Tower of Cupcakes”.
What you need:
- White cake mix - I usually always go with Betty Crocker for some reason
- food coloring of your choice - I used blue, black and light blue
- the usual mixing and baking equipment – mixing bowl, mixing spoon, rubber spatula, little mixing bowl (or in my case a cup), muffin tin and cupcake liners
After I had the cake batter mixed up, I separated a few scoops worth and mixed in different colors. I made 6 different colors – light blue, dark blue, turquoise, white, black, and grey, then baked them as per the instructions on the box.
I did this with cupcakes for a few reasons. (1) I didn’t want to make a huge cake for my little boy to ‘waste’ aside from fulfilling a tradition. (2) I only have two cake pans and didn’t want to spend all day baking cakes to get all the layers I wanted. (3) This was more of an experiment than anything else, and kept it on a small scale in case it didn’t work out.
Then came the frosting. Like I said before, this cake was named “The Leaning Tower of Cupcakes” and this is why. Six cupcakes high, it was very unstable.
In fact, right after I took the above picture this happened. Thank goodness I made two of each color!
In the end, I’m really glad I didn’t make a bigger cake because little B man didn’t even care. In fact, he kind of hated it! (see how much it’s leaning!!)
He did finally grab it and he is one of those weird kids that doesn’t like getting dirty. He hated having the frosting stick to him. He took a couple bites, but basically didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Grant and I finished it off for him!
The absolute best part about this cupcake cake was the inside. Personally, I think it looks awesome. Had it actually been a full-size cake it would have been pretty impressive.
For the rest of the party crew, little G man helped me make some boy colored swirl cupcakes. This was a little more fun for him to make. With the rest of the cake batter I put in a few drips of the black, blue and light blue food coloring and had him stir is just a little. Them I filled up the muffin tins, which swirled the colors even more. I, of course, didn’t take pictures of the finished products. But you can just imagine they were awesome ;)
If you get anything from this post, let it be that you should try all sorts of different colored layer cakes. They take a bit longer in the prep time (and baking, if you only have two cake pans) but they turn out pretty amazing and fun inside. Just don’t make a tower of cupcakes, unless the party theme is “The Leaning Tower of Pisa”.
