How to Make a Surprise Inside Cake

While planning for my next commission, the possibility of making the cake be a surprise inside came up. My friend I'm making the cake for was excited about the possibility. So, I thought I'd go over the surprise inside process. It's kind of fun, I think, especially since it's a change to the standards. And it can have a very dramatic effect.

So just in case you didn't know what a surprise inside is, it's a shape that is a contrasting color to most of the cake that you can't see from the outside that surprises you when you cut into the cake. This is what we were going for.

 I started off with two recipes of my vanilla cake.

 I wanted both cakes to be the same bright, stunning green, so I dyed both recipes together with lots of green food coloring.

 I baked both recipes in a ten inch round cake pan until they were done. True confessions: I actually overbaked the second and slightly deeper one. See below for how bad it was. But I knew I was mainly interested in the inside of the cake, so I wasn't too worried about it.

 Next, I made another double batch of vanilla cake. This time using only egg whites instead of the whole eggs to make the cake a bit whiter.

Despite the dark carmelization, there really is green vanilla cake in there.

 I spooned a few tablespoons of batter into the cake pan.

 Then spread it around

 I cut one of the green cakes into fairly thin slices.

 I used a shamrock cookie cutter and found the largest spot on the cake I could find to cut out the shamrock.

 You want to get as close to the outside of the cake as you can while still being able to fit the whole cookie cutter in the cake. We don't want any missing leaves.

At the end, it should look pretty stable, like this. If you're having trouble with the cake crumbling, try chilling your green cake in the fridge or even the freezer for half an hour or so. It should be much more stable after that.

 One side of the shamrock will be thinner than the other. Place them in your cake with the small side toward the center.

 Keep cutting out pieces and placing them into your batter into a ring formation. In the end it should look something like this.

 Carefully spoon more batter into the pan, making sure to remember the center and making sure to cover all of the green cutouts. This will prevent them from drying out in the oven.

 While the first surprise inside cake is baking, I started on the second one. Here is my overbaked green cake.

 But as you can see, the middle looks fine after you get through the top centimeter of burnt caramelization.

 As long as I'm careful to avoid the black parts, the shamrocks look perfect. I also tasted the cake scraps to be sure they didn't taste burnt and as long as you avoided the black part, it tasted fine, too.

 This is the first one out of the oven. When checking if your cake is done, be sure to check the center ring and not the green part. The green part is already baked, so it could fool you into thinking the cake is done. Also, these double baked cakes take longer to bake than a cake this size usually does because the green pieces don't conduct heat as well as the batter alone does. I baked these in 10 inch cake pans, and they took about an hour to bake through. Maybe slightly more.

 This is the second one ready with shamrocks. Notice the circle is slightly larger than the first one. That's because the second green cake was slightly deeper than the first one, so I could cut the shamrocks out closer to the outer edge. This will just mean, that the shamrocks aren't perfectly on top of each other when you cut into it, which I actually prefer.

 Just in case you didn't figure it out, you will end up with a LOT of cake scraps. There are a lot of options to use them up. We cut off the black part and put them in tupperware containers to snack on at our leasure.

 I also chose to fill the second cake slightly more full.

 I very carefully leveled the first cake. Took off less than I usually would. Once I'm ready to assemble the cake, I'll take off the carmelization on the outside. But I want both layers to be even, so we'll do both together.

 The second is a touch deeper than the first so it had to bake about 15 minutes longer. Consequently, it got a bit darker than the first cake as well.

 I leveled this one as well. We don't want a domed cake. Once again very minimally.

To see how I decorated it, see my post on the Shamrock Baptism Cake. Here's a view of the inside.

There are a thousand possibilities for different colors and flavors here. The downside is that it's significantly more work with lots of baking time, so it's not something that can be done at the last minute. The plus side is you can combine flavors if you want to. And it's very dramatic when cut into. Guests tend to be fairly blown away. And expect the question... "How did you do that?!"