Recipes

How To Make a Piñata Cake

A Cake That Goes The Extra Mile - Make Your Very Own Piñata Cake.

These piñata cakes may look complicated, but they’re actually so easy to assemble - you have to give it a go!

A piñata cake is a stunning centrepiece for any party - for adults and kids alike. When you cut it open you’ll be met with an avalanche of sweets, so it’s a real showstopper. If you’re the type of person who believes that more is more, then this over the top cake spectacular is for you!

We make this cake with our signature vanilla sponge, that’s light and fluffy but still holds its shape when you cut out the middle to house your surprise sweet centre. And it’s paired with the sweetest, most buttery icing to create a fabulous cake that Willy Wonka himself would be proud of.

It’ll take more time than you average cake so we suggest creating it over a couple of days to make it more manageable, but it is possible to create this in just one day.

Ingredients:

For the cake:
340g unsalted butter
650g sugar
8 egg yolks
580g plain flour
1 ½ tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
500ml milk
1 tbsp vanilla extract
Food colouring (optional)
About 2 cups of sweets and sprinkles

For the icing:
450g unsalted butter
1 kg (😱) icing sugar
2 tbsp cream / milk
2 tsp vanilla extract

How to make the piñata cake:

1. Get your butter out of the fridge a couple of hours before you plan to start baking to get it down to room temperature.
2. Preheat your oven to 180ºC.
3. Grease your cake tins with unsalted butter, line with greaseproof paper and then grease again.

Top Tip: You’re going to be baking 6 cakes for this recipe but you probably don’t have 6 cake tins, nor space in your oven for 6 cakes. It’s fine to do them in batches!

4. Next up, combine your dry cake ingredients - that’s the plain flour, baking powder and salt!
5. Beat together your butter and sugar until it’s nice and light and you can’t see any lumps. This should take about 5 minutes with an electric mixer.
6. Pop in your egg yolks one at a time, mixing one in thoroughly before you add the next one.
7. In a cup / jug / receptacle of your choice, combine your milk and vanilla extract.
8. Add one third the dry ingredients to the batter.
9. Add half the milk mixture to the batter.
10. Add another third of the dry ingredients.Add the rest of the milk mixture.
11. Add the rest of the dry ingredients.

Top Tip: don’t get lazy here and just chuck all the ingredients in and hope for the best. Your mixture won’t rise!

12. Give the whole thing a really good mix. Stop after about 4 minutes if you’re using an electric mixer, or when your arms fall off if you’re doing it by hand.
13. Divide your batter evenly between 6 bowls.
14. Now get colouring! If you’re doing a rainbow piñata cake then you’ll need red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple bowls of batter. But you can make these cakes in absolutely any colour you like. Remember to tag Lola’s in your creations on social media so we can see what you create.
15. Once you’ve coloured your mixture, pour it into your cake tins.
16. Ready, set, bake! Get your cakes in the oven for about 15-20 minutes. Once your cakes are completely cool, get your cakes out, wash up your tins then repeat steps 2, 3, 16 and 17 until you’ve baked all of your mixture.
17. Take a well deserved break. You’ve baked 6 cakes - that’s quite an achievement.
18. Now it’s time to make the icing. Get your room temperature butter into a bowl and start to beat it with your electric mixer. Add in most of the icing sugar gradually and mix thoroughly until it’s all combined.
19. Now add in your cream (or milk) and your vanilla extract and mix together until your icing is nice and creamy.
20. If you think the mixture is too runny, then use the icing sugar that you haven't used to firm it up a bit.
21. So you’ve got your cakes, you’ve got your icing, now it’s time to assemble this mountain of cake.
22. Start by placing your purple cake on your serving plate, icing the top of it and then placing the blue cake on top.
23. Now, for the piñata layers! Take your green and yellow cakes and, using a cookie cutter (neat) or a knife (not as neat but still works) cut out a 3 inch hole out of the middle of these cake layers.
24. Ice the top of your blue cake, and put the middle-less green layer on top.Ice the top of the green layer and - you guessed it - put the yellow layer on top of that.
25. Pour in your sweets to the middle hole in your cake, then pour in a load of sprinkles to fill in the gaps between the sweets.

Top Tip: Don’t use chocolate or very soft gummy sweets for the surprise piñata filling as these tend to sweat inside the cake, and no one wants sweaty sweeties!

26. Ice the top of the yellow layer, and place the orange layer on top, hiding the sweets you’ve just poured in.
27. Then ice the orange layer and place the red cake on the top.
28. Ice the top and sides of your cake and decorate with extra sprinkles and sweets!

Top Tip: When decorating a big cake like this, it’s sometimes better to do two layers of icing. So decorate the top and sides with half the icing you have left, then do it again a couple of hours later. This will make your cake look neat and stop the cake crumbs coming through to the surface of the icing.

Want a piñata cake for your next party but not sure you’ll find the time? Check out the Lola’s piñata cake here.