Watermelon Cake

I refuse to let the summer end!  

I made this watermelon cake for a friend's block party.  It is such a cute dessert for a BBQ.   All the kids really loved it.  I wanted to use a strawberry cake mix so there was a hint of fruit flavor but my daughter insisted on having just vanilla so I opted to color the white cake mix reddish pink to look like watermelon instead.  Now it's even easier to finish this cake because you can buy pink and green frosting already pre-colored at the market.  (The pink frosting you will need to add a little red food coloring to make it less of a shocking pink color and more "watermelon" colored.)  Overall very simple cake to bake and assemble.  I hope you give it a try.  I originally saw this cake on Pinterest, you can find the original recipe on this cute blog call Bird on a Cake.

Ingredients:

1 white cake mix, prepared as per direction on box

1/2 cup mini chocolate chips, divided

red food coloring

pink frosting (or white frosting with red food color)

green frosting (or white frosting with green food color)

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  In a large bowl mix white cake mix according to the packaged directions, or of course you can make your favorite white cake from scratch.  Add 5 drops of red food coloring to the prepared batter.  You may add more to get the desired "watermelon" color.  Add about 1/4 cup of mini chocolate chips to the colored cake batter to resemble watermelon seeds.  You do not need to measure this out exactly, just eyeball it.  Reserved the remaining chocolate chips for the top of the cake.  Pour cake batter into two 9" cake pans that have been greased generously with non-stick cooking spray.  Bake cakes at 350 degrees F. for about 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean.  Remove cakes from oven and leave in pans until completely cooled.

Once cakes have cooled, carefully remove them from the pans.  With a serrated knife carefully slice off a small amount of the top of each cake to make them flat.  Place one cake topside down onto  a cake plate.  Take your reddish/pink frosting and frost the top of the first cake leaving about a 1/4 inch around the cake at the edges. Sprinkle the frosting with some more of the mini chocolate chips.  Now take the second cake and place it topside down on top of the 1st cake.  Using green frosting, frost the sides of the cake and about 1/2 inch of the edge on the top of the cake.  Fill the top of the cake in the middle of the green circle with reddish/pink frosting and sprinkle additional mini chocolate chips on the top of the pink to look like watermelon seeds.  Decorated the bottom edge anyway you like, I just did little balls but putting frosting in a ziploc bag and cutting a tiny corner of the bag and squeezing out a little at time to make balls.  

*Notes:

If you want the cake to taste like watermelon, use the powder of a packet of watermelon flavored jello and sprinkle 3/4 of it into the cake batter and the other 1/4 of the packet into the pink frosting.  You could also use a strawberry cake mix if you don't feel like coloring the cake and you will still get a nice fruit flavor to your cake.

You may want to put a thin layer of frosting on the cake and then refrigerate to firm up the frosting and then add a second layer of frosting so it looks nice and smooth.  This just makes it easier to frost and covers up any imperfections.