My daughter turned 4 today! In January I started asking her what kind of birthday party she wanted this year, and after rattling off 7 or 8 ideas, she suddenly yelled, “No, wait! Donut Party! Because donuts are treats, and if I have a donut party, there will be lots of treats at my birthday!”
I watched a bunch of tutorials on making various donut themed cakes, but the cutest ones were stacks of donuts. (Plus that didn’t require me to carve shapes out of cake, or crumb coat everything.) I found a bottle of giant sprinkles at Michael’s, and I found the Fat Daddio ring pan lightly used for $10 with shipping on eBay. (The same one was $20 new at Michael’s.) Heck yeah!
Since I was doing a ton of other smaller projects, I just whipped up 3 box cake mixes; 2 vanilla and 1 chocolate; but I did make the buttercream from scratch. I used 4 Boba tea straws from the back of my cupboard as supports to keep the cake upright, but if I did it again, I might use cake boards between each of the layers. The bottom one was getting a bit squished by party time, but I don’t think anyone noticed but me.
Ada’s favorite color is pink, so I made the top donut pink, and picked out the best colors of sprinkles to match. I was really worried the colors on the sprinkles might bleed overnight, but they held up beautifully. We had about 30 people at the party, and ended up with nearly 1 full cake leftover (3/4 of the purple vanilla, and 1/4 of the chocolate). Looks like we’ll have plenty of sweets for the week.
At one point Ada decided the giant donut cake should have eyeballs. I decided it shouldn’t. She doesn’t seem to have noticed that I ignored her design decision.
. Though I also don’t disagree with your decision to leave them off…
Congratulations! Your Giant Donut Cake is a Featured Project this week!