My Colourful Pinata Cake Recipe

Junior Bake Off 2015 is on this week on CBBC and I love watching both GBBO and Junior Bake Off.

In the first episode of Junior Bake Off this year they had to make a Pinata cake for the showstopper challenge and I decided I wanted to make one too.

My little sister wanted to help me and it was a very busy evening to get it all done.

To make the cakes, I used the usual vanilla sponge recipe I use but timesed the amount by 4 to make 4 cakes. My sister cracked the eggs to put in and I think she lost count so I don't remember her using 8 so I think it had fewer eggs in than it should have but it seemed to work out ok.

How many eggs did you put in Miss T? Not sure!

Ingredients:
480g self-raising flour
4 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp baking powder
8 eggs
480g caster sugar
480g stork
tiny splash of milk
4 different colours of food colouring (I used red, pink, green and blue sugar flair colours)
Sweets for the middle

For the buttercream:
600g icing sugar
300g butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
Sprinkles to decorate

You will also need 4 cake tins that are 8 inches in size. I only had 2 that size and 1 bigger one so I re-used one of the tins after taking the cake out and I trimmed the larger cake to the right size.

Method:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Grease and line the cake tins with baking paper.
2. This is an all-in-one cake mix so I literally mixed all the ingredients together in a mixer.
3. Then I split the mixture evenly between 4 bowls and mixed in a different colour food colouring in each.
4. Then it was time to bake them. They took about 20 minutes each to bake. I checked with a skewer to see if they were ready.
5. I made the buttercream by mixing together the butter, icing sugar and vanilla extract.
6. When the cakes were all cool I started to put them together. I cut out a circle from the middle of the blue and the pink layers.  First I put the green layer at the bottom which was the biggest, then buttercream, then the pink layer with the hole in, then more buttercream, then the blue cake with the hole in.
7. At this stage I filled the hole with sweets. I used smarties, revels and M&Ms.
8. Another layer of buttercream and then the red cake (no hole in this!) on top.
9. I put buttercream over the whole cake and decorated with some sprinkles. Then we had to wait until the next day to eat it because my sister had gone to bed by then.

It was such a cool, pretty, fun cake and the pinata cascade of sweets worked. My family thought it was amazing and they thought it tasted good too.

Even the crumbs looked pretty!