Candy Corn Inspired Ombre Cake

Not all Halloween treats have to be spooky ones. This ombre cake is simple to make with 2 tubs of vanilla frosting, a box of white cake mix, yellow and orange food colors, your favorite cake filling and is inspired by a candy that is synonymous with Fall… Candy Corn. There’s nothing spooky about that.

I used my Wilton 5-layer pan set to make this cake since I wanted the inside of the cake to emulate a piece of candy corn as well. But, there’s no need to get that precise. You could simply bake a two-layer, three-layer or a one-layer cake and let the frosting on the outside speak for itself.

Since I was planning on tinting the cake batter I opted to use a box of Betty Crocker White cake mix. Betty Crocker is my go-to cake mix when I am not in the mood or just don’t have the time to make a cake from scratch.

After mixing the batter per the directions on the box I divided the batter to tint it. From making quite a few cakes in the past I knew that the batter yielded about 4 cups so each pan would have just shy of a cup of batter. Since the top layer of the cake was going to be white I immediately poured that batter into one of the prepared pans (I sprayed it with baking spray) and then divvied up the rest of the batter to tint – about 3 cups for the orange layers and 1 cup for the yellow layer.

Following that I poured the yellow batter (the bottom layer) in the prepared pan and divided the orange batter (the middle layers) among the three remaining pans.

I then placed all of the pans on a rack in my 350 F preheated oven for about 15 minutes and after letting the cakes cool in the pans for 10 minutes I transferred them to a wire rack to cool completely. Once they cooled, I did a little torting to make sure the layers would sit evenly on top of one another…

It was then time to fill the layers – I opted to fill them with a quick vanilla mousse recipe that uses two ingredients: 2 cups of heavy cream and Jell-O vanilla pudding mix.

And then I crumb coated the cake with vanilla frosting and placed it in the refrigerator for about 20 minutes.

Then it was time to create the candy corn ombre effect on the outside of the cake. I tinted about a cup and a half of the vanilla frosting with the yellow food color and frosted that along the bottom of the cake…

Next I tinted about two and a half cups of the vanilla frosting with the orange food color and spread that along the middle of the cake and finally I used the vanilla frosting untinted to frost the remaining portion of the side of the cake as well as the top of the cake. To create the ombre effect, I smoothed the sides of the cake with a long icing spatula.

And for presentation some candy corns around the base of cake…

And here’s a peek inside…

And there you have it, a super cute and super simple unspooky Halloween treat!