Today, one lucky lady will be getting this cake for her birthday! I could not be more pleased with how it turned out.
I’ve demonstrated how to make some of the buttercream flowers in some of my previous posts like in my Floral Piping Tips blog post. So in this post, I am going to show you how to create an ombre effect on your cakes.
First you will need to separate your buttercream into at least 3 portions. Each portion will be dyed a different shade in a monochromatic color scheme (varying shades of the same color). For this cake I did a purple ombre with three shades.
For the Darkest shade of purple I used two drops of the Violet Squeeze Gel Color by Sunny Side Up Bakery (purchased at Hobby Lobby). For the medium shade, I used one drop and for the lightest shade I used my plain vanilla buttercream with no coloring.
Fill a piping bag with each of the colors and snip the end of the bag.
Start with a smooth crumb coat of plain white (vanilla) buttercream and thick layer of the lightest shade buttercream on the top of the cake. Then beginning the ombre at the bottom with the darkest color, piping 1-3 lines around the cake. Then continue with 1-3 lines of the medium shade. And top it off with 1-3 lines of the lightest shade until you have reach the top edge of the cake.
Now using a bench scraper, smooth the frosting in a horizontal motion, in long smooth strokes around the cake.
Once you have smoothed the buttercream, you will see the ombre effect coming together. At this point you can go back in with additional buttercream to fill in holes and soften any hard lines in the frosting.
You can try this technique with any color! Change it up and use multiple colors instead of just one!
Jamie's Sweets 