Don’t know how to solve the birthday-cake-for-your-child dilemma? Make a colorful bundt cake!!! 😀

Trust me, it’s the perfect solution, the unexpectable idea… just make it! and you’ll make everyone happy, especially your child, my word. 🙂

As I mentioned in my last newsletter (a little promo for those who haven’t subscribed yet 🙂) it just so happens that for my son’s birthday, I never have time to make a decent cake or, when I do, some last-minute hiccup ruins my good intentions.
Problems that, well, never happen to me in May for Flavia’s birthday (and I can’t understand why!).

And why the successful birthday cakes for Flavia never make it to this blog, while the quirky ones for Fabrizio’s birthday almost always do… is another mystery of my life and this blog, but oh well, let’s not ask too many existential questions! (at least not today).

So, after the famous (or should I say infamous 😄) cakes pink Lego brick, backup and happy old man you already know – and for which I’ve been paying the price for years, ehm, 😂 – this year I’ve expressed myself with this colorful bundt cake with which, perhaps, I hope, this scattered mom who-never-became-a-pastry-chef has, maybe, at least a little, redeemed herself in the eyes of the birthday boy.

If only because it’s a very traditional bundt cake, derived from the very traditional marble cake in my faithful recipe notebook, containing no less than 3 eggs for 200 grams of flour!, a ratio I haven’t used for ages, since I discovered that even without eggs you can make respectable bundt cakes. But so, at least on his birthday, this son who accuses me of becoming vegan was satisfied!, he had his daily ration of eggs and butter and couldn’t complain, hooray. 😃

For this colorful bundt cake, using only blue and yellow (with which I then created green), I used two vials of liquid food coloring, the kind commonly sold in all supermarkets.

I had tried once before, in the past, to color a bundt cake with these liquid colorings, getting a poor result, colors so pale that it made me think this type of coloring wasn’t suitable for this use (in fact, many recipes circulating on the web recommend gel colorings). Now, after this successfully vibrant colorful bundt cake, I’ve come to the conclusion that back then, I simply didn’t use the right proportions.

Regarding color choice, it is clear that everyone can unleash their imagination with the colors they prefer, this time I excluded red to deliberately avoid any trace of pink in this bundt cake, given my past experiences that still haunt me. 😄

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Besides the already mentioned cakes made for Fabrizio’s birthday, I also have some “normal” birthday cakes, which I promptly link below, if you feel like checking them out:

Difficulty: Easy
Cost: Cheap
Preparation time: 20 Minutes
Portions: 8 slices
Cooking methods: Oven
Cuisine: Italian
Seasonality: All seasons

Ingredients

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
7 tbsp butter
3/4 cup sugar
3 eggs
4 tbsp milk
lemon zest (grated)
2 vials food coloring (liquid)
1 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder (heaped)
as needed milk (to dissolve cocoa)
Half packet baking powder

Tools

Bundt pan
Mixer
Bowls

Steps

Cream the butter with the sugar.
Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well each egg into the mixture before adding the next.
Soften with the milk.
Add the flour by sifting it together with the baking powder.
Flavor with a generous grating of lemon zest.
Mix the batter well with a whisk to make it homogeneous.
Divide the mixture into 5 parts.
Initially, I divided it into 4 considering to color the bundt cake yellow and blue (the 2 vials) + the 2 base colors, that is the “bundt cake color” and the brown of the cocoa-added part. When I realized that 2 vials were plenty, I used part of the two liquids to create green, managing to get all vibrant colors.
Leave one part of the mixture the yellowish-bundt cake color and color a part with cocoa proceeding this way: in a small bowl dissolve the cocoa in a little milk, 3-4 tablespoons, mixing well with a spoon then add it to the mixture.
Consider that this addition of cocoa will increase the amount of this part of the mixture, so if you don’t want a predominance of chocolate color in the bundt cake it’s good to use a smaller amount of mixture compared to the other parts.
In the end, it is not necessary for the proportions between the colors to be perfect, after all this is NOT a rainbow cake, it’s more a harlequin bundt cake being made with bold colors decided on the spot and arranged irregularly, in short, a colorful cake that’s “as it comes” 😀
Color the three remaining parts using the two vials.
Grease and flour a bundt pan (small, one liter. If you want to use a large pan you need to double all the doses).
Pour all the mixture into the pan alternating the colors as you like.
Bake in the oven at 392°F (200°C) for 25 minutes, halfway through cooking lower to 356°F (180°C) (but you adjust according to your oven, as always).
Remove from the oven, unmold and turn the bundt cake over, which in the pan looks like this:
Let it cool on a rack before slicing.
Serve your scenic colorful bundt cake enjoying the swirls that will appear on each slice. The children (but also some adults!) will be delighted 🙂
An extra treat: For special occasions, or simply because you also love whipped cream as much as we do, I suggest accompanying each slice with a nice dollop of whipped cream, on top or beside the slice. I don’t have a photo of this version with the cream, but that doesn’t mean I won’t add one someday!
Happy birthday! Enjoy your snack! Happy Carnival! Enjoy whatever you like!