When I set out to make the mini devil’s chocolate cake, I had another agenda in mind – ruffles, and lots of it! Since making little girl’s pink ombre rose swirl birthday cake last year, I have wanted to make a ruffle layered cake. Like ombre cakes, ruffles are everywhere these days and they’re so darn pretty!
I am so glad that these are mini cakes for so many different reasons! Firstly, the amount of swiss meringue buttercream needed to pipe just one miniature cake is astonishing! I have about 6 mini devil’s chocolate cake sitting on the counter top waiting for them to be transformed into something wonderful than just plain chocolate cake. I thought I would have enough swiss meringue buttercream to pipe at least three of these cakes. I had this vision of separate cakes made of pink ruffles, coral ruffles and finally, orange ruffles. Sadly, the buttercream ran out before I could attempt orange ruffles. And yes, I know my coral ruffles look more peachy, you can blame this on staying up late on a school night to pipe ruffles (that’s how keen I was)! Sadly, I still have 4 mini devil’s chocolate cake waiting for something magical to happen to them!
As excited as I was when I started this, decorating these cakes turned out to be an infuriating process! I started piping pink ruffles until I got around half way one cake and realised I didn’t have enough pink buttercream to complete the cake (as I said, I thought I’d have enough to pipe 3 so divided my batch into thirds). So I had to scrape off the ruffles, remix a new pink colour and start the piping process all over again. Let me just say, piping ruffles takes a long time! So I was not pleased I had to restart the process! I then discovered I didn’t know how to pipe the top of the cake, so my first attempt ended up looking like an ugly mess that I scraped it off. I decided I would just smooth the top over instead!
After piping pink ruffles, the fun of mixing colours and piping ruffles had completely worn off and I was in a very much “I am so over this” mood! This explains why my attempt at a coral colour turned out to be more peachy than coral. At least the ruffles on top of the coral cake turned out somewhat okay (still not what I had in mind but like I said, I was over it by this stage).
Despite the arduous affair, I love ruffles! They’re so pretty! I would definitely make a ruffle cake again (and I’d even go so far as to make proper 9 inch 4 layered cake), except that I just wouldn’t do it late on a school night!
Oh, and of course I needed to show what the inside of the cake looked like!
