There are drip cakes, and then there are sprinkle drip cakes. And let me tell you, while both are pretty to look at, the sprinkle version is so much more fun! The sprinkle drip cake trend was popularized by one of my favorite cakers to follow on Instagram, @brittanymaycakes. To my knowledge, she’s the little genius behind putting sprinkles on top of a ganache drip, and I just had to give it a go because it looks so stunning – especially with this Bewitched sprinkle mix by SprinklePop.

While any sprinkle mix will do for creating a sprinkle drip cake, I was really drawn to the vibrant color scheme of Bewitched. It’s a magical blend of pink, purple, teal, and yellow jimmies and spheres, plus gold and silver dragees to give it some extra bling. I decided to color the buttercream backdrop a deep fuschia (with Americolor soft gel past in Fuschia) to really compliment all of the sprinkle colors, but they’d look pretty on all sorts of buttercream hues. Just look at how pretty they are:

The essentials you’ll need for this look are a good pair of tweezers, the perfect sprinkle mix, and a great chocolate ganache recipe. I’ve got the perfect chocolate ganache recipe and white chocolate ganache recipe at the links below, with all the tips you need for successful drips. The tweezers make it easier to perfectly place the sprinkles (as opposed to using your fingers). And it’ll look incredible with any of SprinklePop’s gorgeous sprinkle mixes! Just pick your favorite and follow along the tutorial below:

You Will Need:

• A chilled buttercream cake
• 1 batch of chocolate ganache or white chocolate ganache
• 8 oz bottle of Bewitched sprinkles (or other favorite sprinkle mix)
• Tweezers

Step 1: Do A Test Drip

Before you get too crazy dripping your ganache, I always think it’s a great idea to do a test drip on your chilled buttercream cake. Make sure your ganache is room temperature and good drip consistency first, create one drip on the side of your cake, and wait until it stops traveling.

If your ganache is too runny or warm, it will travel all the way to the bottom of the cake quickly. If it’s too cold and thick, it won’t travel much at all. Adjust the consistency and temperature of your ganache if need be, and only continue the process of dripping your cake once you’re satisfied with the look of the drips.

Step 2: Drip The Sides Of The Cake

Once your ganache has passed the first drip test, continue dripping your ganache down the sides using either a squeeze bottle or the spoon method.

It’s best to start by dripping every side before moving on to the top of the cake. This way you can better control the look of the drips from the side view and only fill what’s necessary on the top.

Step 3: Fill In The Top Of The Cake

When all the sides have been dripped, pour a small amount of ganache on the top of the cake and smooth it with an icing spatula or the back of your spoon.

Be sure to only fill in the space that’s not yet covered with ganache, because adding too much might make your drips travel farther than you’d like. I always spread the ganache on top until it just reaches where the drips have started to cover on the top of the cake.

Step 4: Place The Sprinkles

Let the ganache rest in the refrigerator for about five minutes while you pour the sprinkles into a small bowl. After refrigerating for just those few minutes, the ganache drips should be sticky, but set enough to ensure that adding sprinkles won’t drag them down.

Using your tweezers, place the sprinkles onto the ganache one by one until you achieve the look you’re going for. This could take anywhere from 20-30 minutes, depending on how precise you want to be, but trust me. It’s so worth it!

Step 5: Keep On Decorating

While you can stop after you’ve created your sprinkle drip, I believe that when it comes to SprinklePop sprinkles, more is more!

Before I dripped the cake, I added a border of Bewitched sprinkles to the bottom edge, and after creating the sprinkle drip I added a buttercream border to the top of this cake using Wilton Tip 6B, then filled in the entire top of the cake with even more sprinkles. So fun!

Ready to create your very own sprinkle drip cake? Just grab a bottle of your favorite sprinkles and let the fun begin!  

The post Sprinkle Drip Cake Tutorial appeared first on Sugar & Sparrow.

This Cake Comb set comes with three combs that are double sided, meaning you can get six different looks in one little set. You can use any of these combs on your buttercream finish to get a cool, textured look that’s picture-perfect. For this tutorial in particular, the comb with the square cutouts is exactly what you need for stripes. As you drag it through your buttercream, those little squares will carve out ridges that can be filled with any color you want, then smoothed all together for a flawless striped finish.

Here’s a quick video of the process, and I’ll share everything you need to know about creating striped cakes from start to finish below. Be sure to read all of the tips in each section, because there are a few hacks I’ve learned along the way: 

You Will Need:

• A 6-inch cake that’s been crumb coated and chilled
• 2 batches of vanilla buttercream 
• Icing Smoother
• Angled Spatula 
• Wilton Icing Comb Set
• Food color gels of your choice
• A piping bag

Step 1: Frost And Smooth The Cake

With your crumb coated cake on the turntable, frost a layer of buttercream onto the top of the cake and smooth it with your angled spatula. Then, add a thick layer of buttercream to the sides of the cake and use your icing scraper to smooth it until the sides are even. 

The layer of frosting on the sides of the cake should be thick and deep enough for your cake comb to pass through and create ridges, about ¼ inch or more. Don’t worry about creating the sharp edges on the top of the cake just yet, only focus on getting those sides nice and smooth.

Step 2: Create Ridges With The Cake Comb

Next, hold the cake comb next to the cake at about a 45 degree angle towards you and gently turn the turntable. You’ll want to gradually create these ridges, so be sure to only apply a tiny amount of pressure at first. Each time you go around the cake, clean your cake comb completely by holding it under running water and drying it. You want it to be free of any buttercream bits to create perfect ridges.

If you find that there are holes or gaps in some of the ridges, fill them in with buttercream and go over them again with the cake comb. Also, if your ridges are tearing when you pass over the buttercream with the cake comb, it most likely means that your buttercream is too stiff. Luckily there’s an easy fix! Simply add a little bit of room temperature milk to your buttercream and mix it with your mixer for a thinner-consistency buttercream. Then, add the buttercream wherever your ridges have ripped and smooth them over with the cake comb.

Keep going around the cake until your ridges are more than ⅛ inch deep. Once you’ve reached the ideal depth, use your angled spatula to create sharp edges on the top of your cake. Swipe the buttercream from the outer edges toward the center of the cake until those edges look sharp and the top of the cake looks smooth and even. 

Step 3: Chill For 30 Minutes 

This step is critical to creating evenly spaced buttercream stripes, because if you skip this step and the buttercream is too soft, the stripes can spread and look uneven. Simply pop the cake in the refrigerator and chill the buttercream for at least 30 minutes, until it’s firm to the touch. 

Step 4: Fill The Ridges With Color

Add your favorite food color gel to the remaining buttercream and mix it up. I used the Wilton Color Right Food Coloring System from JOANN to mix up this deep fuschia color (using the pink and blue colors). Add the colored buttercream into a piping bag and snip off about ¼ inch opening on the end. With your chilled cake on the turntable, pipe the colored buttercream into the ridges. 

It’s best to overfill the ridges rather than underfill them – you want to make sure that the colored buttercream reaches every space within the ridge. 

Step 5: Smooth The Stripes 

Finally, use a clean icing smoother to go around the cake several times and remove the excess colored buttercream. You’ll want to clean the icing smoother every time you go around the cake to ensure that you’re removing as much of the colored buttercream as you can. 

This step requires a bit of patience, but as you carefully smooth and remove excess buttercream, you’ll see those perfect stripes start to peek through. Continue this process until all of the excess buttercream has been removed and those stripes look perfect!

From here, you can continue decorating the cake if you wish. To get this look, I added some Sweet Tooth Fairy sprinkles, a buttercream border using Wilton Tip 1M, and turquoise gumballs. All of these pretty decorating supplies can be found at JOANN! 

The best part about this technique is that you can use any stripe color combination you want! Just follow the above steps and you’re good to go. I hope this tutorial gives you more confidence in creating buttercream stripes and you’ll find everything you need to get the look at JOANN. And the best part is, if you download the JOANN app, you’ll get tons of coupons to get these cake supplies at a discount. Happy cake striping! 

Disclaimer: I was compensated by JOANN for my work of creating this project, styling, filming, photographing, and writing about their products. As always, all opinions are honest and my own. Thank you for supporting brands that support Sugar & Sparrow.

The post How To Create Striped Buttercream Cakes With A Cake Comb appeared first on Sugar & Sparrow.

Unicorns are arguably the best mythical creatures of all. It’s no wonder that they became a major trend in the cake and party planning world! You’ve probably seen plenty of unicorn cakes in your social media feeds, the most popular look being the ones where the entire cake looks like a unicorn head. I thought I’d switch it up a little bit with this one, especially because I got my hands on a bottle of this Unicorn sprinkle mix by SprinklePop! They’d look amazing on any cake design, but I really love how they enhance the magical colors and textures going on in this unicorn cake:

The Unicorn sprinkle mix is made up of the most beautiful textures and colors. It’s a blend of pastel pinks, purples, and blues, mixed with gold metallic accents and tiny wafer paper unicorns. In other words, pure magic in a bottle! I was so obsessed with the color palette of the sprinkles that I decided to theme the entire cake around it. Just look at those pretty colors and the cute wafer paper unicorns!

This cake is perfect for any unicorn lover and is actually quite simple to create. It all starts with a smooth frosted buttercream cake and some easy piping. I used three of my favorite piping tips to get the look (listed below) and then pressed the Unicorn sprinkles onto the smooth part of the cake in a floating sprinkle design. And finally, I topped it with a sprinkle-covered white chocolate unicorn that I created using a unicorn shaped cookie cutter and a few wisps of pink and blue cotton candy for good measure. I’m pretty over the moon with how it turned out!

Every detailed instruction for how to make this unicorn-inspired cake is in the tutorial below, but I also made a video to show you the process! Take a look:

You Will Need:

• A frosted buttercream cake
• 1 batch of vanilla buttercream frosting
• 8oz bottle of Unicorn Sprinkles
• Wilton Tips 1M, 104, and 4B
• Piping bags
• Icing color gels of your choice
• ½ cup white chocolate chips
• Wax paper
• A unicorn-shaped cookie cutter
• ½ tsp coconut oil
• Cotton candy

Step 1: Make The Unicorn Cake Topper

To make the unicorn cake topper, spread out a small sheet of wax paper onto a moveable flat surface (like a cookie sheet). Add the white chocolate chips to a microwave-safe bowl, then reserve about ⅛ cup of them and set aside. These reserved chips will act as a “seed” to help temper the melted chocolate. Microwave the white chocolate chips sans “seed” in 30 second increments until melted, stirring after each interval, then toss in the reserved chips and stir until everything is fully melted.

Spread the melted white chocolate onto the wax paper about ¼ inch thick. Smooth the coconut oil onto the edges and crevices of the unicorn-shaped cookie cutter (helps with easy release once the white chocolate is set), then press the cookie cutter into the melted white chocolate.

While the chocolate is still wet, add Unicorn sprinkles to cover the entire area within the unicorn cookie cutter and gently press them in. Refrigerate the sprinkle-covered white chocolate unicorn for 10 minutes, or until firm to the touch.

Carefully remove the excess white chocolate from the edges of the cookie cutter, then release the center from the mold.

Step 2: Mix Up a Buttercream Color Palette

Divide the buttercream into a few separate bowls for color mixing. I ended up making five different colors for my palette. First, I used a mix of Americolor Electric Pink and Electric Purple to create a dark pink, then created a light pink by mixing that with white buttercream. Next, I used Americolor Sky Blue to create the light and darker blue shades. And finally, I used Americolor Regal Purple to create the purple tone.

Feel free to use whatever colors you’d like for your color palette! I’m sure the Unicorn sprinkle mix would look gorgeous with any pastel tones.

Step 3: Pipe the Bottom of the Cake

Prepare a few piping bags by fitting them with Wilton tip 1M, 4B, and 104, then filling them with your colored buttercream. Any of your favorite piping tips will do for this part, but here’s how to recreate the look. First, pipe rosettes with Wilton tip 1M:

Next, pipe ruffles to accent the edges of the rosettes using Wilton tip 104:

And finally, fill in the empty spaces with open stars in a few different colors using Wilton tip 4B:

Step 4: Add the Floating Sprinkles

One by one, add sprinkles to the smooth part of the buttercream cake in a floating pattern. You can either use tweezers for this part, or press a sprinkle onto the tip of your finger and gently press it into the buttercream.

Repeat until you’ve covered the top half of the cake with floating Unicorn sprinkles.

Step 5: Top the Cake

To complete the cake design, stick the legs of your sprinkle-covered unicorn into the top of the cake, then add some cotton candy as a backdrop. Just remember to add the cotton candy within an hour or two of serving the cake, because it’ll start to melt if you put it in the fridge.

As a final finishing touch, I also used Wilton tip 4B to pipe some open stars around the unicorn in a random pattern, then sprinkled some more Unicorn sprinkles (because more is more, people!).

And there you have it! A unicorn-inspired cake perfect for any magical occasion.

Is there a unicorn party in your future? Let me know if you end up making this cake by leaving a comment below! You can also tag me on Instagram so I can see what you’re caking. It gives me all the feels!

The post Unicorn Party Cake Tutorial appeared first on Sugar & Sparrow.

After testing so many chocolate cake recipes over the years, I’ve come really close to perfection only to miss the mark on the essentials of a good chocolate cake: moistness, fluffiness, and great chocolate flavor. You know, the kind with the slightly sticky crumb that just melts in your mouth and almost makes your eyes roll back in your head because it’s just that good. While my chocolate cakes of the past have been acceptable, this one I’m about to share is the absolute best I’ve ever had. No joke. It’s fudgy, moist, decadent, and makes me so giddy I want to shout it from the rooftops!

The best part of this chocolate cake recipe is that it’s about as easy as a cake mix. It’s a one-bowl cake, meaning you basically put all the ingredients into one bowl (in the right order, of course) and whip it up into the smoothest chocolate cake batter ever. There are absolutely no complicated steps to this cake, which makes it super failproof and the perfect go-to chocolate cake recipe for your repertoire.

This cake is ultra-moist due to the vegetable oil base and the addition of buttermilk. If you don’t have buttermilk on hand, you can easily make it from scratch using whole milk. Just mix it with white vinegar (exact recipe is in the notes below), let it sit for about 15 minutes, and voila! Perfect buttermilk every time.

You can pair this chocolate cake with almost any buttercream, but I’ve chosen to pair it with my favorite chocolate buttercream recipe to really enhance the chocolate flavor. In the past I’ve paired it with cherry, raspberry, almond, salted caramel, and vanilla buttercreams and those pairings have been super tasty.

The rope border on top of this cake was created using Wilton Tip 1M to pipe rosettes on top of one another around the edge of the cake. Then I topped it all off with one of my favorite sprinkle mixes ever – Rainbow Road by SprinklePop. I think sprinkles are the perfect finishing touch, but you can decorate however you’d like.

Here’s a video I made to show you all the tips and tricks for making this chocolate cake recipe (below). For more recipe videos like this one + tons of cake decorating videos, head to my YouTube Channel and be sure to click the Subscribe button so you never miss a new one!

Update 2022 – Two things: 1) I realized that you can absolutely make this recipe by hand instead of using a mixer! That makes it an even easier one bowl cake. Exact instructions are in the notes of the recipe below. 2) I prefer using hot coffee in this recipe (enhances the chocolate flavor big time!), but you can absolutely use hot water as an alternative.

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Perfect One-Bowl Chocolate Cake Recipe

A moist, decadent chocolate cake that is so easy and quick to whip up, it’ll become a forever go-to. Top it with chocolate buttercream for the best chocolate cake ever. 

Prep Time 5 minutes

Cook Time 45 minutes

Total Time 50 minutes

Servings 15 slices

Ingredients

• 2 Cups (265g) all purpose flour
• 1 2/3 Cups (340g) white granulated sugar
• 2/3 Cup (60g) unsweetened natural cocoa powder
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt
• 1/2 Cup (120ml) vegetable oil
• 2 eggs, room temperature
• 1 1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 1 Cup (240ml) full-fat buttermilk*, room temperature DIY recipe in the notes
• 1 Cup (240ml) hot coffee or hot water

Instructions

• Preheat the oven to 350ºF and prepare three 6-inch or two 8-inch cake pans by spraying the sides with cooking spray and fitting the bottoms with a wax paper or parchment cake circle. 
• Place all of the dry ingredients into the bowl of a stand mixer and stir on low for 30 seconds to fully combine them. Add the vegetable oil, eggs, vanilla, and buttermilk and mix on low until just combined. With the mixer still on low, add the hot water in a slow stream, then turn the mixer to medium and beat until smooth, about 2 minutes. The batter will be very thin. 
• Pour into prepared cake pans no more than 2/3 full and bake for 32-36 minutes, until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool completely before frosting with chocolate buttercream or frosting of your choice.

Notes

DIY Buttermilk recipe: add 1 Tbsp of white vinegar to a jar and top it with 1 Cup of whole milk. Stir and let sit for 15 minutes before using in the recipe. 

Make ahead tips: this cake can be made ahead and stored at room temperature, covered tightly in plastic wrap, for up to two days. Alternatively, you can cover with plastic wrap and store in the freezer for up to two months before thawing to room temperature. 

To Make as Cupcakes: fill the tins no more than 2/3 full and bake at 350ºF for 15-18 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. 

To Make by Hand (Without a Mixer): In a large bowl, whisk the dry ingredients together until uniform. Add the vegetable oil, eggs, vanilla, and buttermilk, and whisk everything together until smooth. Whisking constantly, add the hot coffee (or water) in a slow, steady stream. Continue whisking until the batter is smooth and uniform. It will be very thin. Pour into prepared cake pans and bake according to the recipe above. 

Did you make this recipe? Let me know what you think in the comments below, or by tagging me on Instagram! I love to see your creations and hear your feedback.

The post The Perfect One-Bowl Chocolate Cake Recipe appeared first on Sugar & Sparrow.