I’ve gotten lots of requests for a tutorial on how I made my van Gogh cake (see it here!), so it’s a good thing I took lots of pictures while I was making it! Also, please don’t think I’m some magical/professional baker, ‘cause I’m not. I just like making stuff, and I REALLY like van Gogh. You can totally do this too. I got the idea for this cake a couple months ago, and I’m so thrilled with how it turned out! Now, without further ado…
Figure out what you want to do. I picked my favourite paintings, but maybe they’re not yours. That’s okay! Just have a plan. And if you have any van Gogh-inspired clothing, now is the perfect time to wear it.
Step 2: Make your cake batter
I used a boxed white cake mix, but if you have a family recipe or something, go for it. It really doesn’t matter, as long as it’s light in colour (since you’re gonna dye it).
Once you’ve made your batter, divide it into little bowls, one for every colour you’re going to need. Then use food colouring to dye it, and keep playing with it until you’re happy with it. Make whatever colours you want in your finished cake; they don’t really fade or change when you bake it. I used mostly regular liquid food colouring (nothing fancy, just what we had in the house), but I had a gel dye for the black (again, we just had that kicking around. No clue why). I made a bit less of the black and yellow, because I just wanted them for accents, but I made about the same amount of each of the blues.
Step 4: Drizzle it all together
This is kinda fun. Take spoonfuls of your dyed batter and drizzle/glob/pour it into your (greased!) cake pans. I tried to do a bit of a gradient from light to dark, but it’s not that finicky. Just keep in mind that whatever colour you put in LAST (so whatever is on top) will be a bit more prominent in the finished cake. The stuff on the bottom tends to spread out and make a thin layer.
Bake your layers normally (I suppose you could do this as a single layer cake, I just wanted to do layers, and those were the pans we had), and then cool completely. I know, it’s hard to wait, but your icing will melt off if you don’t. I left mine on some parchment paper on wire trays. You can see the colours really didn’t change, except *maybe* on the side where they browned a bit?
I used this recipe, with half shortening and half butter. The shortening keeps it from melting, so it holds its shape better. Then divide it up and dye it for all the colours you need. I ended up making yellow (for in-between the layers and the sunflowers), a yellow/orange (sunflowers and accents), a brown (sunflower centers), and then two different blues and two different greens as the main colours.
I had to slice off the top of my bottom layer to make it even. Then I plopped a glob of yellow icing in the middle and tried to get it to the edges. It got a LOT easier when I dipped my knife in warm water. There were still crumbs everywhere, but nobody can tell when it’s the inside of a cake, right? Carefully put your top layer on top of the icing, and then you get to the fun part! ICING!
What’s great about copying van Gogh is that you don’t have to be too precise. I did everything but the sunflowers with a butter knife and a cup of warm water to clean it off. This is where having two shades of the same colour really paid off; I sorta smooshed and swirled them together on the cake and it added depth and made it look a lot more like a painting. For the sunflowers I put a stripe of orange icing up the side of the piping bag and then filled the rest with yellow (I have no idea what tip I used- it was thin and wide, slightly curved on one side and squiggly on the other?), and I used the brown with a tiny star tip for the centers. It helped me to have the paintings I was copying on my phone beside me while I did this, so I could get it right.
And there you have it! Admire your work, take lots of pictures, and amaze your friends and family when you cut it open!
If you make your own van Gogh cake, I’d love to see!!
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