How to make an Inside Out cake

When I threw my Inside Out themed birthday party, I may have gotten just a little ambitious with the cake. I was searching Pinterest for ideas and came across one that I loved. However, it certainly looked complicated and above my limited baking experience. Nevertheless, it would be so cool if it worked! I decided to go for it – worst case scenario it would be a total disaster and would then become my submission to be on Neflix’s show Nailed It!

But – shockingly – it didn’t turn out that badly.  In fact, one might venture it say it actually came out pretty well! I followed these basic instructions from the blog Once upon a Pedestal. She is clearly a very skilled baker so I adapted a lot of these instructions. I thought it was worth sharing here since others may be more amateur bakers like myself. Some of the major changes included doing only 5 layers instead of 10, leaving out the wafer paper “shells,” and forgoing the fondant topper.

Ingredients

• 3 boxes of white cake mix
• Food coloring
• 5 7″ aluminum baking pans
• 3 containers of white frosting
• Sixlets or jawbreakers

Directions:

1. Use one box of cake mix to make 24 cupcakes. Use liners and try to make sure they don’t brown too much.
2. Crumble the cupcakes and distribute the crumbs evenly between 5 different bowls.
3. Mix another 2 more batches of cake mix (but don’t bake it). Layer about 1/2 cup of batter to each of the 5 bowls.
4. Add a different color of food coloring to each bowl – red, purple, yellow, blue, and green. Mix everything up well together.
5. Put each colored batter into a piping bag with about a #12 round piping tip (I don’t use these – amateur baker, remember? So I just eyeballed it).
6. Spray aluminum baking pans and pour about 3 tablespoons of batter into each pan and tilt to distribute evenly. The batter will barely cover the pans.
7. Starting at the outside edge, pipe a row of colored batter in a circle. Alternate colors for each ring until you get to the center. Do this in all 5 pans (starting with a different color each time).
8. Add 3 more tablespoons of batter on top of the colored rings in each baking pan and spread evenly over top.
9. Bake all 5 pans for about 20 minutes or until done.
10. Freeze the cake layers while you make the icing, to make them easier to work with.
11. Dye the frosting purple. I used 2 containers originally and it wasn’t enough, so I recommend 3.
12. Once the cake layers are frozen, stack them and add a layer of frosting between each one.
13. Frost the whole outside of the cake.
14. Stick the sixlets or jawbreakers into the sides of the cake in a pattern of your choice (I found this easiest to do between layers so they would stay, but it ended up being a little uneven. You could also try what the original recipe did and great little shelves between each layer to hold them).

Enjoy!

What do you think of this Inside Out cake?