Ombre cake and oreo cakeballs

I destroyed the kitchen yesterday making two new desserts for a friend’s 30th house party. First a four-layer purple ombre cake and then some oreo cakeballs. Both things that had been showing up on pinterest and I wanted to try…

I’ll start with the cakeballs. I used this recipe but with sprinkles (obviously needed!) and Trader Joe’s oreos and lowfat cream cheese. A cakeball is still a cakeball – these are not healthy – but the swaps help a little bit (no hydrogenated oil, etc.) and even more importantly, I don’t think the swaps make a noticeable difference in taste or texture.

As I was packing up the plate to go home a woman ran up and yelled, “OMG did you make those?!” And then when I said yes she gave me a great big bear hug. Haha. Always fun to get unsolicited tipsy hugs from strangers for your party contribution.

Next, the ombre cake. This required:
– 2 boxes of Duncan Hines white cake mix
– a jar of raspberry preserves (to spread between the layers)
–  4 cake pans (I own 3, so I had to bake in two stages)
– one homemade chocolate frosting recipe taken from the back of the cocoa tin

I made the double cake mix in one big bowl, added a couple drops of coloring, stirred, and filled the first pan. Then I added more coloring to the bowl and repeated the process. I had to eyeball how much to pour in each pan…and as you can see not all of the layers are the same height, but at that point I didn’t have enough clean dishes to spread the batter between four bowls.

Here’s the layers all stacked together with raspberry jam in between:

Then the frosting! Someone who likes cake more than me might want to argue about the merits of homemade cake, but me, I can’t really tell the difference between it and the boxed stuff. I don’t think most people can. Homemade frosting, on the other hand, is 100% worth the time. People go bonkers for it.

The birthday girl was soooo excited to see the color layers. She had also had a few gin cocktails by then, but hey, regardless the cake was a hit. I couldn’t do all that work and not have a picture of the layers, so while she kept most of the leftovers I did squirrel one slice home at the end of the night so I could photograph it.