Jeff Parker Cooks

Lately I have had a few requests for birthday cakes.  I LOVE to bake, have taken numerous cake decorating classes, and actually went to cooking school with the idea of becoming a pastry chef. SIDE NOTE: Contrary to Top Chef: Just Desserts, not all pastry chefs are an emotional train wreck… but I digress.  A couple weeks ago, best gal-pal Sarah asked if I would make a birthday cake for her daughter Chloe’s second birthday. Sure! Happy to! The kicker… chocolate cake and the theme of the party is tie-dye. Hmmmm….

Tie-dye. How in the hell am I gonna make a tie-dyed cake? A couple friends, including Sara, said just make the cake, put it on a colorful plate and call it a day. Since many of you don’t know me that well, those who do will tell you that that is not how I roll.

The cake itself wasn’t the issue. White cake or yellow cake sure, easy. Just color the cake batter different colors and spoon it into the pans, bake it off, et voilà multi-colored cake! Although an easy out, I couldn’t bring myself to do that to her. You see, I had a traumatic experience with colored cakes as a kid.  My mom had purchased cake pan inserts to make a checkerboard cake for my birthday. She asked what kind of cake I wanted and thinking out of the box, I said a blue and yellow cake — I must have been a Cub Scout. However, when the cake was sliced at my party, there was no way in hell that I was going to eat it. What kind of unnatural thing is a blue and yellow cake?!

I Googled images for “tie-dye decorated cake” (go ahead, try it) and found a bunch of seriously ugly cakes worthy of the blog Cake Wrecks.  The cakes that I liked had used an airbrush for the effect and I don’t own an airbrush or know how to use one.  There was also a lot of chatter on the interweb about an episode of Cake Boss where he created a tie-dyed cake using fondant. All I could find was a paragraph on the TLC website that explained how he did it, but no images of the final product. I love you Chloe, but I ain’t spendin’ $30 on a tub of fondant, which btw tastes nasty, to try and figure it out.

Using different colored icings wouldn’t do for two reasons: 1) the colors look flat and more like a jigsaw puzzle, and 2) if you’re not really careful the colors become muddy when they start to blend. The cool thing about tie-dye, if tie-dye were to be cool, is the visual texture.  That texture happens because of gradation of color and the white showing through (where the rubber band was, duh).

A couple days later I remembered an icing technique called brush striping where instead of coloring the icing, the food coloring is painted in stripes top-to-bottom inside the pastry bag. (Sorry, I forgot to take pictures.) This technique only works with gel paste food coloring and not the liquid coloring from the grocery store.  So I painted a single stripe of each color: blue, purple, hot pink,  orange, yellow, and green on the inside of my pastry bag and loaded it up with white butter cream and started piping swirls on the cake.

All-in-all, I was pretty happy with the way the cake turned out. Sarah was happy, Chloe was happy, and the cake was delicious! Mission accomplished. Oh yeah, Chloe’s cake was double dark chocolate with peanut butter and chocolate ganache fillings, YUM.

Peace – J