Little Sunshine Pink Ombré Ruffled Cake

This Little Sunshine pink ombré ruffled cake was for a little girl's birthday celebration, on the day of her actual birthday. Her birthday party had to be postponed last Saturday because she fell sick! I'm so glad she is feeling better and able to celebrate her birthday with her family. Don't worry, she will still have her Little Sunshine birthday bash as planned, only two weeks later! 

Little Sunshine Pink Ombré Ruffled Cake

The birthday cake was the ever-popular decadent Devil's food cake, filled with whipped dark chocolate ganache and decorated with fancy "tutu-style" buttercream ruffles, in four shades of pink! I was so excited to finally get the opportunity to use my fancy new ruffle tip (PME Frill Tube number 70) for this cake! I saw a video of someone using it on a cake and it looked like the easiest thing ever to make perfect looking ruffles!

PME Frill Tubes
(image from How Sweet is That)

The ruffles that came out were a different style than those made using traditional ruffle tip no. 104. These ones really looked like dress frills. (Definitely muuuuuch easier than making fondant ruffles) I did ending up using a lot less buttercream cuz there is really no effort involved when piping it out. Just squeeze the piping bag onto your cake while rotating the cake turntable and boom, you've got a layer of ruffles, unlike when using ruffle tip no. 104, where you have to do an up and down motion with your wrist to create proper ruffley waves. 

closer look at PME Frill Tip #70

It was tricky at first to get the hang of using this new frill tip because if you don't position the top correctly on the cake surface, the buttercream won't be "anchored" properly and the frill will just drop off the side of the cake, which happened a few times! (not fun scraping off all the ruffles and starting over!!) But having said that, I was done piping ruffles on this cake in under 10 minutes (not counting the time it took to make 4 shades of pink buttercream and wash & dry the tip out in between in each colour)!

Fondant details :)

To top the cake, I made a cute little sunshine topper (with little eyelashes and a big pink bow!) and some funky lettering. Be warned, these new ruffles are really delicate! (curses to you, heat and humidity here in the tropics!!) By delicate, I mean that the layer of buttercream is thin (which makes nice ruffles), but because it's thin, it melts faster! The birthday girl's mummy said that she noticed the ruffles looking really melty after she took it out of the fridge, so she quickly moved it into an air-conditioned room, but it didn't help much!! It's strange though, cuz the cake did not melt at all was left in an un-airconditoined car in a parking lot of a mall's basement. We shall have to do more tests to find out! Anyway, happy 1st birthday, baby D! 

enjoying a cloud cake pop that somebody snuck her!