Watermelon Cake – First Attempt

Oh boy!  This is a Test Kitchen Doozy!

As carefully as this cake was planned, nothing is a sure thing until it’s baked, stacked, and frosted.  Let me walk us through from the beginning…

I love the visual that watermelon provides – I’m not a big fan of the fruit because of the texture, but I love the flavor.  Certainly a cake that mimics the look of a watermelon has been done.  Pinterest is filled with many takes on this idea; mine own idea is similar but has the look of a simple, traditional cake.

Baking the ‘watermelon rind’ was a cinch – go with a wonderful green.  I tinting 1 cup of batter using Wilton’s Leaf Green coloring gel. The original idea was to have a dark green layer of cake approximately 1″ tall, then a layer of light green buttercream followed by a 1/2″ white layer of cake.  It was my hope this ombré effect would mimic the rind. 

I trimmed away a 1/2″ layer of chocolate – seeds don’t congregate like that, do they?

I wanted to have two layers of dark pink mirroring the fruit.  The color seems to be good, but the seeds were an epic fail.  Typically, I dust chocolate chips in flour before adding them to a brownie or cake mix.  Since I was using the mini-chips, I thought I could skip this step.  Nope.  Nearly all of them sank.  This was not the result I was looking for.

Overzealous filling of the pans resulted in both centers sinking…no help for this but a trim.

When it came to stacking, it was easy to start with the green.  But I forgot to leave out white buttercream for the layer between the white and dark pink layers.  I had to pull from the already tinted, pink – but I’d only separated enough for one layer and now it was necessary to make it work for two.  Wah.  #cakewhining

At the end of the day, the proportions are off.  The Wilton gels worked wonderfully, but the layer heights were just out of whack.  The flavors were spot on – the White Cake is almond-flavored, it has a deep luscious flavor with outstanding texture (this is a classic wedding cake and bakes up white).

The chip/seeds look good at this point, but when sliced – this wasn’t visible.

Score marks every 1″ helped keep the spiraling lines from going too wonky.

I really love the exterior cake design – I’ve used this pattern before with chocolate and vanilla.  The dark and light green stripes were inspired by the look of a watermelon.  I like simple.  I also need to remember to not rush while I’m working; that’s a tendency of mine.

On a scale of 1 to 10 … I’d give this cake maybe a 6.5.  The flavor is good and components of the look are nice, but it just didn’t come together.  And maybe it’s just too small – I baked with 6″ rounds, maybe 8″ would be better.  What I do know is this… I want to try this one again.  Maybe I’ll get invited to a summer picnic.

I’m grateful for my people.  Our oldest daughter, Marie, told me I’m my harshest critic.  She might be right.  For sure I know I’m crazy about my life partner.