Neapolitan Cake
Three of my family members are all born within 11 days of each other and so naturally we celebrate their birthday’s together! I didn’t think six of us needed to split 3 different cakes or desserts so I wanted to make something that said “three” in one. A quick google search showed me many Neapolitan Cake decoration so I decided to go for it since it appeared like 3 different cakes.
With the holidays coming up I wasn’t in the right headspace to make three different cakes from scratch, knowing I was going to be doing a lot of baking in the future. And…if you’ve ever made a strawberry cake you know it’s a lot of work! Boxed cake to the rescue! I knew I was going to spend a lot of time decorating the cake so I went the simple route and bought three boxed cake mixes.
I figured while I was in the store I might as well just buy the canned icing too. Sometimes you just aren’t in the mood for the baking part of baking. I wanted to decorate a cake and this was the fastest way I was going to get there.
To decorate, I started with three cans of icing – two white and one chocolate. I used gel food coloring to make one of my white cans pink.
I cut the tops off of my cakes to level them and stacked them before realizing that I wanted my crumb coat to match the colors I was going to pipe. So I unstacked and started at the bottom coating my chocolate cake in chocolate icing. Then did a layer of chocolate in between the cakes, stacked my pink cake and continued onward.
I used a pretty large star tip to create the flowers and little green candies for the leaves.
Keys to icing success:
- Make sure your cakes are 100% cool.
- Create a crumb coat so that if there are gaps in your flowers you aren’t see bare cake.
- After the crumb coat, set the cake in the fridge to firm up a little.
- Pipe with a purpose. Know how big your flower will be before starting it so you can plan out your ending.
- Work as quickly as possible. Hot hands are not your friend and your icing can easily become too soft and difficult to work with.
- Know when to stop. I almost added more leaves/glitter to the top before taking a step back and realizing it looked the way I wanted already.
- Protect your masterpiece. Keep it safely covered and away from anything that could fall on it or smoosh it.
The cake was a success and all three family members enjoyed it and thought it was a very fun idea!
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