Tie-Dye Cake

Happy Hippie Birthday! 

Definitely not organic.

I feel it's unlucky to celebrate a birthday without cake. Usually I make a low-fat lemon cake and serve it with berries on the side. This year, however, I used a mix from the grocery store: Duff's Pastel Tie-Dye Premium Cake Mix. I can't help that tie-dye just really enchants me. (A few weeks ago I bought a tie-dye hair scrunchie; that's as far as it goes with the attire, though.) I'm aware that food coloring is obviously NOT organic. In fact, the ingredients in one of the food coloring shades from this mix lists the abhorred propylene glycol. Still, I couldn't resist.

This tie-dye cake was a lot of work and created too many dishes. It requires dividing the mix into six bowls and using various combinations of food coloring to achieve the different shades. I can imagine this being chaotic if you have kids helping. Each tiny packet of food coloring must be carefully pierced and you need only a drop or two in each bowl. The colors come out nice if you do it right, but one little mistake could ruin the whole thing.

Coloring the cake batter.

After coloring the batter, I had to layer it in the pan according to the directions. Pink first, then orange and so on. The directions state to let each layer "spread out on its own," but this is impossible. I had to raise up the pan and thump on it to get the entire surface covered with the initial pink layer. After that, I just spiraled the other colors on top of each other, making sure not to stir them. Since I was making a layer cake, I completed this process twice. After the cake was baked and cooled on a rack, I found it impossible to get the layers out of the pan (even though it was a non-stick pan). I froze them and then managed to peel them out using a rubber spatula. They weren't perfect, but good enough.

Layering the batter.

The final product looked and tasted only OK. It's a very crumbly cake that is difficult to serve. There's nothing special about it except the colors. Still, it made my birthday a little brighter!