Adorable Robin's Egg Easter Cake

I made THE BEST cake I have ever made. I'm normally not a big cake person but both times I made this cake they were a complete hit and I found myself sneaking bits around midnight.

The recipe made by Modern Honey is so fluffy and dense that it's perfect for any occasion. I first made the cake according to its normal recipe and instructions which can be found in my recipe catalog here, using a 9 inch pan. After confirming it is the best recipe I have ever used I decided I wanted to make mini cakes for Easter because - why not they're freaking adorable and I can put more effort into baking for special occasions.

Initially, I thought I messed up by using a smaller cake dish because I thought I had over cooked the cakes and the initial bite-out-of-the-oven did not taste as good as the first cake I made but after giving it time to cool it came out even better - dense but still extremely moist. So this cake is like pizza - even when it's bad it's cook. It's virtually fool proof.

Tips I've learned from making the cake:

1. Use less flour

• The recipe calls for bakers flour which I did not have but it supposedly has less gluten in it than normal flour so I'll definitely be doing more investigating. The cake comes out incredibly with normal flour BUT I used slightly less about 2 cups.

2. Substitute for buttermilk

• Like every other normal, average American I don't have buttermilk in my house and believe it or not Walmart had none. There's 3 main substitutes for buttermilk and I went with the least burdensome.

• 1 cup of milk (I used whole milk thinking it'd be most creamy) and 2 tsp cream of tartar.

3. Difficult to get height

• The first cake did not have that nice tall shape I wanted which also prompted me to use the mini cake pans. I filled them up much higher than the 9inch pans which made a really great height.

4. Mini cake tips

• Fill the pan higher and bake for the same amount of time, but keep an eye on it! I thought I'd bake it for less time being that they're smaller cakes, but really it only was about 2 mins shorter.

• The batter that had made a 2 layer cake in the 9 inch pans yielded 4-5 mini two-tiered mini cakes that were pretty tall.

Decorating the cake:

Materials

• mini Robin Eggs

• Chocolate almond bark

• coconut oil

• plastic wrap

• blue food coloring

• brown food coloring

I bought everything from Walmart. I used chocolate almond bark to make the egg basket. I put a spoon of coconut oil into the bowl of chocolate and melted it in the microwave at 30 second intervals.

Once melted I spooned the chocolate into the corner of a small ziplock bag, cut the tip, and squeezed the chocolate into small bowls with plastic wrap in them. Then I set them in the freezer to chill.

For the robin's egg blue and speckled pattern on the cake I used normal icing coloring from the baking section of Walmart. Both colors. used are Wilton Icing Colorings. There was only one color blue available - Cornflower Blue, but it came out so beautifully. The pictures don't do the color justice but it's this beautiful pale tiffany color.

Because I wasn't sure what the blue would turn out to be I added the coloring in batches. I used a tooth pick, dipped it into the coloring then poked it into the icing then mixed REALLY well. Just a dot of coloring goes an extremely long way so go slow.

For the brown spots I also used a tooth pick, dipped it into the coloring, then I actually ran it quickly under the faucet so that it would spread nicely because the coloring I bought is very thick. I think flicked the tooth pick all over the cake to get nice spots (note it can get all over but wipes off easily). I used a toothpick and the time before a paint brush, but it would also work with a fork.

Once the chocolate set, I carefully pulled back the plastic, filled them with eggs and laid them on top the cakes! And there you have it.