Easter Cake | Yellow Cake Recipe

Living in a Catholic country, Holy Week is keenly observed. Palm Sunday, Visita Iglesia, Station of the Cross, lighting candles for parades (statues of saints parading in our town), and many more are practiced. The most joyful part, however, is the resurrection of Christ, which is celebrated through Easter.

The way I see it through the internet and foreign TV shows (such reliable sources, eh?), Easter Sunday is celebrated in other countries through Easter egg hunting and is represented by the Easter bunny. While there are some private subdivisions and malls who hold that activity, it's not that famous in my country. I didn't even know what the Easter bunny was until I was around 12! What my family does is to go to mass, then hold our annual family reunion.

Now that I know how to bake, our reunion is sweeter. Our celebration is just fine the way it is, but I get a lil' bit envy with all the pastel colors and treats in other countries on the same occasion. So here, I decided to make a simple yellow cake with lots of pastel colors in it.

Okay, the decorations on the top was supposed to be pastel colored, too. I had these star-shaped sprinkles (or jimmies, as others say it), but I spared it because I plan to use it on other things (needless to say that I felt like I made the wrong decision of sparing those because I could have just bought a new bag on my next cake/cupcake idea). Either way, I feel like it still turned out pretty because of all the lively colors! The yellow cake was a perfect neutralizer for all those colors. And admit it - we all need a basic cake recipe for those time when we want to concentrate on the cake's design. ;) The pastel polka dots is inspired by iambaker's obsession with polka dots. ;)

Ingredients
1/2 cup oil
4 egg yolks
3/4 cup water
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
4 egg whites
1/2 tsp cream of tartar

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 175C.
2. Mix together oil, egg yolks, water, and vanilla in a large mixing bowl. Set aside.
3. Sift together flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Add slowly into wet ingredients, and beat until smooth batter forms.
4. In a small mixing bowl, beat egg whites and cream of tartar using an electric mixer. Beat until egg whites are stiff. (You can still achieve this even without a mixer; just be patient with beating the egg whites). Fold the stiff egg whites into the batter.  
5. Pour the cake batter into a cake pan. Bake for 30 minutes. Cool the cake layers before frosting. 

Makes 2 layers of 8" cake.

Recipe adapted from WikiHow.

To achieve the pastel polka-dots, I took two spoonfuls of plain buttercream, placed it on a separate bowl, and added 1 small drop of food coloring. Remember to add one drop at a time and to stir it before adding another drop because we are making pastel colored frosting here. If you made the mistake of adding too much color, add more plain buttercream to lighten it. The colors I chose were pink (but I used a red food coloring), blue, and green. Put it in separate piping bags (or make sure to clean it before adding a new colored frosting), and cut a very small hole on the tip to achieve small dots. To make the dots a little bit bigger, add a little bit more pressure on the bag.

Now that you have a recipe for a simple and easy yellow cake, start getting creative on your cake designs! ;)