I came across an amazing blog, called Cooking With Sugar, with some sensational recipes.  I saw a pic on Facebook of the blog’s rainbow tie-die Christmas wreath bundt cake, and immediately thought how fun it would be to make it with my son. I love how easy it is, and how it can be adapted to other themes using different colours.

I’m not a great cake decorator, and about a quarter of the cake stuck to the silicon cake mould (I am now going to stick to proper baking tins and pans), but the result was still quite good, and tasted fantastic. The main thing was that my son, his friend and I had a ball mixing, swirling and decorating, which counts for everything.

The recipe calls for cake mix (I used Ina Paarman) and ready-to -use icing (I used Pilsbury), but if you’re a purist, you can obviously still make the cake and icing from scratch, using recipes for basic vanilla sponge and white icing.

Here’s the recipe, just one of the fantastic ones on the site.

Rainbow Tie-Dye Christmas Wreath

Prep time: 20 minutes

Start to finish: 2 hours

12 servings

Ingredients:

• 1 box white cake mix
• Water, vegetable oil and eggs, called for on cake mix box
• Red food colouring
• Green food colouring
• 1 can white frosting
• Red and green coloured sprinkles (optional)

Directions:

Heat oven to 180°C. Generously grease a 12-cup tube cake pan. Make cake batter as directed on box.

Pour 1/2 of the batter into a bowl then divide the other half equally into two other bowls. You will be left with 3 bowls of batter. Add some red food coloring to one of the smaller bowls of batter and mix well. Add some green food coloring to the other smaller bowl and mix well.

Pour the bowl containing 1/2 of the white cake batter into the bottom of the greased pan. Carefully pour the red batter over the white batter.  Then carefully pour the green batter over the red batter.

Then pour the rest of the white batter over everything. Do not mix the colors with a spoon just let then fall over the other colous in a ring wherever it lays.

Bake as directed on box or until toothpick inserted in centre comes out clean. Cool 3-5 minutes. Turn pan upside down onto cooling rack that is placed over a biscuit sheet. Cool cake completely, about 30 minutes.

Once cake is cool, equally divide the frosting into 2 bowls. Microwave the white frosting for about 5-10 seconds on high, mix well with a spoon until it is smooth enough to drizzle over the cake.

With a spoon, drizzle the white frosting back and forth around the whole ring in a striping pattern until you use all the frosting. Then microwave the other bowl. Before drizzling over cake, mix in a few drops of green food colouring. Then drizzle over the cake, scattering back and forth in the same type of striping pattern. Set cake aside to dry, then serve.

A delicious “mess”