Candy Corn Cake

I have been wanting to make a layered fondant cake for a while now and the ever-popular Halloween candy presented the perfect inspiration.  I have made a rainbow cake before and so I knew that I could use basic food coloring and get perfectly colored candy corn layers.  This time I wanted to see if I could achieve a similar result with natural dyes.

As the pictures show, the resulting colors were more subdued, natural and earthy looking than if I had used traditional food coloring.  If you want a more vibrant look or if you want to match the candy corn colors exactly, I recommend using store-bought food coloring.  In my case, the fact that my almost three-year old son liked the sweet potato, pumpkin and carrot cakes and didn’t miss the bright colors made it a success. 

What I learned is that I probably won’t use sweet potato as a natural dye again. Though my family liked the sweet potato cake layer, I had to use a lot of sweet potato to achieve a yellow shade which changed the texture of that layer of cake and the yellow became earthier in tone as it baked. For yellow, I would instead use a combo of 1-2 egg yolks and a small amount of pumpkin puree.  {*Thanks to one of my readers, Amanda, for suggesting saffron for a yellow dye which I now intend to try very soon!}  For the orange layer I would probably use carrot juice again with a small amount of pumpkin puree. If I were making an entire orange cake I think I would add the carrot juice in place of some of the milk while making the batter so that the amount of liquid would not be drastically increased.

I baked a basic white cake from Cooking Light magazine into three small 5-inch layers and then saved the rest of the batter for cupcakes.  You could skip the fondant and simply ice the cake with buttercream frosting or make candy corn cupcakes by layering one spoonful each of yellow batter, orange batter and white batter into cupcake liners.  However you do it, candy corns make the perfect {and easy} cake decorating garnish.