I made this dessert for our Mother’s Day Tea a few weeks ago (I seriously need to blog about that and where I came up with the idea for it…soon, very soon). Anyway, I wanted to make a pretty cake with a slightly different flavor and this fit both bills.
It is a pink champagne cake with pink champagne buttercream frosting tinted pink and white. It was good. Really, really good. It was also sweet. Very, very sweet. Like I could only eat a tiny slice. Gracie, however, would have eaten the whole thing in one sitting if I let her. And that girl generally doesn’t like cake.
Anyway, I saw the ruffled cake on Martha Stewart sometime in March. (Steve, if you’re reading this…yes, I go to Martha Stewart’s website. Often. Very often. Steve does not like Martha Stewart. There are some things we agree to disagree about in our marriage. Martha is one of them
) So, I knew how I wanted to decorate it early on.
Then, sometime in April I saw a recipe for Pink Champagne Cake in a magazine. It looked wonderful. So I put a bookmark on the magazine page and then promptly lost the entire magazine. So, two days before the tea I was scouring the internet for pink champagne cake recipes. Luckily, I found several!
Some of the cake recipes where from scratch. I would have liked to have tried one, but they were fairly labor intensive. I knew I wanted to make homemade frosting and I was cooking several other things for the Tea, so my time was somewhat limited. I decided to take the easy path and start with a cake mix and doctor it up.
I knew I wanted a tall cake and I realized after I finished the pink champagne cake that I didn’t have as much height as I wanted, so I made up a white cake mix for the center layer (I used 1/2 the mix and made cupcakes with the other 1/2). I used whole eggs instead of the egg whites that the box called for so the cake would be dense enough to not collapse under the top layer of pink champagne cake. If you don’t care about height, you could certainly leave this layer out. I think it looked really pretty, though, with the white and pink cake together!
So, here’s the recipe:
Pink Champagne Cake
1 box French Vanilla cake mix (you could use a white cake mix)
1 1/3 cups pink champagne, chilled (if you’re using the white mix, just replace the liquid amount with equal parts champagne)
1/3 cup vegetable oil
3 large eggs
1- 2 Tablespoons pink food coloring (use more or less to get the color you want)
Mix cake as directed on box (mix in the food coloring after you’ve already combined and mixed everything else). Pour into 2 prepared 8 inch round cake pans. Bake as directed.
After baking, let the cakes cool in the pans for five minutes. Then, remove them from the pan and let them cool completely on a wire cooling rack. Frost with Pink Champagne Buttercream Frosting.
Pink Champagne Buttercream Frosting
1 cup butter, softened
4 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup milk
1/4 cup champagne
1 tablespoon vanilla
5-5 1/2 cups additional powdered sugar
Pink food coloring
Beat butter for 30 seconds. Gradually add 4 cups powdered sugar. Beat in milk, champagne and vanilla. Gradually beat in 5-5 1/2 more cups powdered sugar until it reaches the consistency you want. Add food coloring a drop at a time to the frosting until it reaches the color you want.
**Note: If you can’t find or don’t have pink food coloring, you can use red – you’ll just use less***
Enjoy with a glass of cold mike or a flute of champagne!