Purple Ombre Sprinkle Cake

 

Alright, we're making sprinkle cake today. You'll need ingredients for your favorite vanilla cake recipe, a round cake pan (I used a 7 inch), and whole lot of sprinkles.

Mix up the vanilla recipe and evenly divide the batter into however many bowls you like. I used 5 colors so I can get a true ombre effect from white to dark purple. Each color will be a layer of cake. Tint each batter with increasingly more purple, or whatever color you're using. I start light and then move to the darker colors so if I mess up (say, I add too much purple to the lightest purple) I still have enough batter to mix up another lightest purple and use the other one as a middle color.

Okay, so we skipped a few steps. Bake the cakes, stack them with your favorite frosting recipe (I used this creamy buttercream). Ice the outside of the cake, throw some sprinkles at it (yes, literally). I promise you a better tutorial sometime in the future...

 Ta da! I used fresh strawberries between the layers as well. Doesn't cut as clean, but the taste is great and really, when you're making cake that's what counts. Very impressive and, if you have some patience, really not much harder than a traditional layer cake (except for the mess!).

Every year, my mom asks for a sprinkle cake for her birthday. This year's sprinkle cake (on the bunny stand, far right) was a smaller affair, but very sweet nonetheless.

Lemon Bar Hamentaschen: Step-by-step

Purim is coming up! It's a Jewish holiday filled with celebration, silliness, and, of course, food. In celebration (and because they're delicious) I made some hamantaschen. They're basically just a three-cornered cookie with some sort of filling in the middle. These amazing recipes have been making their way around Facebook, and I was inspired by the lemon bar variety.

So let's get started! We start with a basic sweet dough. This one is butter free, baking this entire recipe dairy free - yay! The dough is tougher and sturdier than your average cookie dough and also less-sweet. I used this dough recipe here. Roll the dough out right away and cut into circles. I didn't have a circle cookie cutter, so I used a drinking glass. Worked just as well.

Because I was using a liquid filling, I didn't fold the cookie around the filling. Instead, I folded the cookie first to make a little cup. 

 
Just pinch in each corner.

Make sure to press firmly so they don't open up in the oven. 

Nice little cups ready for filling. 

 

I made a standard lemon bar filling using eggs, flour, sugar, and lemon juice. I cooked it over the stove to thicken it before filling the cookies.

Spooning it in.

Then I gave the corners and extra pinch just to make sure they stayed where they were supposed to.

And here we go! Beautiful right out of the oven. I did a little dance when I saw how well they kept their shape!

These treats are surprisingly easy and super impressive. From idea to oven in only about 45 minutes.

A little sprinkle of powdered sugar on the top and they're ready to go. 

By the way, these little guys travel pretty well, too.

And taste great! Not too sweet, not too soft, not too crunchy, not too messy. Easy to pick up and eat and a good size, too.

Happy Purim!