Ombre Ruffle Cake Tutorial

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This Ombre Ruffle Cake post was originally published in 2017 and has been newly updated for 2024.

I love the simplicity of this Ombre Ruffle Cake. Once you learn how to make a ruffle cake, you will come back to this style of decorating over and over again.

Why you will love this Ombre Ruffle Cake

• Simple frosting decoration that even beginner cake decorators will love making.
• Imperfections are hidden -A ruffle cake is a really forgiving way to decorate your cake. Any lumps and bumps are easily hidden by the frosting.
• Suitable for all occasions – You can easily change the frosting colour.
• Easily made into more than one tier cake.
• Quick last minute cake – Frosting is so much quicker than fondant when decorating a cake for those last minute cake orders.
• Frosting tastes so much nicer than fondant!

I love that buttercream or frosting ruffle cakes are so ‘in’ – as much as I love sugarcraft, fondant isn’t always the most appropriate.

The cake

You can use your favourite cake recipe for this cake but I do like to stick to a vanilla cake. I use the same ingredients for the vanilla cake (which is the consistency of a madeira/pound cake) as in this Rainbow Drops Birthday Cake but halve the ingredients.

Vanilla Frosting

The full recipe card for the vanilla frosting I use is at the bottom of this post. I use this recipe all the time. You may have seen it used on my Rainbow Drops Birthday Cake and my Easy Drip Cake.

I say ‘simple-looking’ when I describe making this cake as I think it is quite deceiving. I thought it would be quicker than it was. I have followed various You Tube videos of how to make an Ombre cake and all of them have said have your different colours of buttercream all ready made up.

I didn’t want to be left with loads of buttercream leftover in various shades of pink or even worse, run out of a certain colour half way through and have to try and match some up. I did each colour one at a time then, starting with the darkest colour (bottom). Keep adding paler frosting to the piping bag as you go along.

Ingredients for making vanilla ombre frosting

Butter – I use Lurpak butter as it is much paler than other butters.

Icing Sugar – You will use a lot!

Vanilla Extract

Pink Gel Food Colouring – I use Sugarflair Baby Pink. If you want the deeper pink of the ombre to be really vibrant you might want to use Sugarflair Hot Pink instead as it gets deeper pink.

Equipment needed to make a Frosting Ruffle Cake

Cake tin: I used the 10 inch Petal cake tin for this cake out of this Petal shaped cake tin set. I just love the shape of these cakes – they are so versatile and you can add decorations into the inlets if you like.

For this cake I used a petal shaped cake board drum as I already had one in stock. A round one does just as nice a job though as is much cheaper. For a 10″ cake I would use a 14″ cake drum or larger.

Pallet Knife: My first job was to decide which tool to spread the ball of icing with. I tried my small pallet knife (pointy & thin, suitable for finer, thin ruffles), then my spatula’s handle (Would be better for larger cakes – I would use this for the bottom tier of a 2 or 3 tier birthday cake) then came across my 2yo’s princess knife (just right). See? Specialist, expensive tools are not always necessary.

You can buy various shapes of inexpensive pallet knives which are perfect for this type of cake decorating. Just remember not to mix your tools if you do other non-edible crafts such as painting. I always find an angled handle pallet knife much easier so you don’t catch the sides of the cake.

Piping Bag: I use large disposable piping bags on a roll.

You do not need a nozzle for this type of piping. You only need a nozzle like this Wilton 1M nozzle if you are piping frosting roses like on this Ombre Pink Rose Birthday Cake.

I used a small diamante 18 cake topper for the 18 but if you are doing a larger cake like this 2 tier 40th Birthday Bling cake, might like to use a bigger number cake topper.

TIP: Always ask for your cake toppers back as you can save a fortune and reuse them!

How to make a ruffle cake

Apologies for the quality of pictures – Very old camera when these were taken!

Cover the cake with a thin layer of buttercream frosting. As you can see it doesn’t need to be perfectly neat. Also cover the board at this stage – You will want to make the board fairly neat as you are not adding more decoration to it.

I also make slight indents with my pallet knife so I know where the centre of the cake is to keep you on track as you are piping.

To pipe, I cut the disposable piping bag in a straight line – about a 8mm wide hole should be plenty. I piped one blob side on, so you get a vertical blob, and then flattened and spread one side to the right using the princess knife. It is very important to scrape the knife clean AFTER EVERY BLOB!

You soon get in the swing of judging how far apart to pipe each blob. I have seen some Ombre cakes where 2 or 3 layers/lines are in the same colour. I know this probably makes life a lot simpler and the cake quicker to make but I thought if I’m going to do an ombre cake, I might aswell do it properly and make the colour different every time – why make things easy for myself??

The tricky bit is the last blob of each colour. I always made sure I finished at the same place at the back of the cake of if it wasn’t so neat it didn’t matter so much. I also angled the last blob in to the centre slightly for lack of anywhere else to go really.

Storage and Freezer Instructions

This cake is suitable for freezing but needs to be frozen before being assembled.

The cake

Freeze the cake as soon as possible after baking, once it has cooled down. Wrap in baking parchment and wrap a layer of tinned foil around the baking parchment.

Leave to defrost at room temperature, whilst still wrapped for around 6 hours until fully defrosted.

Freezing buttercream frosting

The frosting is also fine to freeze. Place in a clean Tupperware box or butter tub with a lid, to keep the best quality.

Defrost in the fridge for 12 hours and use within 24 hours.

Other Ombre Posts you might enjoy

Pink Ombre Wedding Cake

Pink Rose Ombre Birthday Cake

Other Pink Cakes you might like

Rainbow Drops Birthday Cake

Pink 50th Birthday Cake

Pink and Lilac Birthday Cake

Pink 80th Birthday Cake