I have seen some content creators that I follow turn grocery store cakes into beautiful custom wedding cakes, so I decided to challenge myself to make a birthday cake using store-bought cakes. I chose to utilize the cake and frosting as much as possible, and not rely on making extra buttercream or other items if I could help it. So, I ended up making this fault line ice cream cone birthday cake!
I also made a video featuring the decorating of this cake! Check it out here:
Disclosure: There are Amazon affiliate links provided in the post below. If you click on any of the Amazon links and make a purchase, I do get a small percentage of the sale which helps me pay for my ingredients and my website. I genuinely use anything that I link, and I want to make it easy for you to find these ingredients and kitchen tools, too, if you want to utilize them!
I decided to get a couple of sprinkle cakes because the only other options for the cakes I found on sale were chocolate and vanilla, both of which had cake crumbs covering the sides. I figured that at least with these sprinkle cakes, I could get some pretty colors. And again, they were on sale, so I couldn’t beat the price!
Prepping the Store-Bought Cakes:
First, I used an offset spatula to carefully remove the frosting. The top had less sprinkles, so I added that to one bowl, while I added the frosting with tons of sprinkles from the side of the cake into a separate bowl. I also had a third bowl to add buttercream that had cake scraps in it because I didn’t want to see cake scraps in the final coating of frosting when reassembling the cake. Instead, I used the cake crumb buttercream for crumb coating the cake.
After the first was done, it was time to do the second!
After both cakes were done, I decided to thoroughly mix the sprinkles into the frosting because they were already dyeing the buttercream pink and purple, so I just wanted to make sure all of the frosting in each bowl was the same color.
Next, it was time to cut the cakes! I decided to use a cookie/biscuit cutter that was about 3 ½ inches, or 8.89 centimeters, in diameter. This allowed me to get 2 circles out of each cake. I set the extra cake aside to make some cake pop dough later.
Assembling the Cake:
Once that was done, it was time to assemble the cake! I added a little dollop of buttercream to act as the glue to keep the cake on the cake board and then added one of the cake layers. Next, I added a little bit of the purple frosting and smoothed it into an thin, even layer. I then repeated this process until the cake was fully stacked.
Because I made this cake pretty tall, especially for its small diameter, I needed to use something to keep the cake together. I had some unused straws, so I decided to use them as my dowels to help keep the cake straight. Using my offset spatula, I spread the frosting – that had the cake crumbs in it – onto an even layer on the outside of the cake. Once I got it as smooth as possible, I placed it in the fridge to allow the frosting to firm up.
After allowing the cake to chill, I added the purple frosting around the middle of the side of the cake. I then decided to add some Wilton white sparkling sugar sprinkles to this buttercream to give it more sparkle and texture. With thoroughly clean hands, I attempted to start adding the sprinkles by cupping some of them in my hand and trying to add it to the side of the cake. This was messy and didn’t work out like I hoped it would. So, I then used just one of my fingers to gently press some sprinkles onto the side of the cake until the middle was completely covered.
Next, I added the pink frosting to the top and bottom of the sides of the cake, as well as the top of the cake. I made sure to slightly overlap the purple frosting. I realized that the height and softness of this cake continued to make it very unstable, so I decided to cut the straw in half to have a couple of straw dowels in the cake and hopefully make it more stable.
Once I got the buttercream as smooth as I could, which wasn’t easy because of the sprinkles in the frosting, I used some Wilton edible metallic gold paint to brush the light colored buttercream along those rough edges. This added some really nice dimension and color to the cake!
Note: If you’re curious, this decoration style is called a fault line cake. It’s called this because it almost looks like the cake broke apart to expose the inside. I’ve wanted to try this design for a while, so while I was scraping and separating the buttercream into the bowls earlier, I just decided to finally attempt this design. It’s not my favorite cake design because I personally favor smooth-sided cakes, but it’s always good to try something new! What do you think about fault line cakes? Are you a fan or do you prefer other cake designs? Make sure to drop your thoughts in the comments below!
Once I was done with the gold, I decided to add two more straw pieces, because oh my gosh you guys, this cake was like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It did not want to stay straight. One thing I would do in the future to improve this is to level the tops of the cake slices. The particular cakes that I got were not perfectly flat on top, but I thought that if I added the buttercream to help balance it, it wouldn’t lean. However, I also underestimated how little buttercream I had to work with, so I was not able to correct it like I hoped. My straw dowels definitely helped, but now I know how to improve the structural issues in possible future grocery store cake challenges! I also added a little bit of buttercream to the top to cover the straws, and then placed that in the fridge to chill while working on the cake topper.
Prepping the Cake Topper Components:
Next, I added some of the cake scraps and remnant frosting to a bowl and mixed that up. I added a little bit too much buttercream, so I mixed in some more cake scraps. Once the mixture was a good consistency that could hold a shape, I rolled some into a ball and then set it aside.
Then, I cut the bottom off a waffle cone, making sure that the size of the cone was not too big or too small for the ball of cake pop dough I just made.
And finally, it was time to make the ganache! I only needed a little bit, so I added ½ cup of white chocolate chips and 2 tablespoons of heavy whipping cream to a microwave-safe bowl. I heated it in short increments of 15-30 seconds at a time, making sure to stir in between. Once all of the white chocolate was completely melted, I set it aside to slightly cool for a couple of minutes.
Finish the Cake:
Now, it was time to put everything together! I had a tiny bit of frosting leftover from my grocery store cupcake video, so I added a little to the top and smoothed it into a flat layer. This acted as my glue for the cake ball that I placed on top and in the center of the cake.
I then poured the ganache over the top of the cake ball and let it flow over the top of the cake. It started to set very quickly, so I used my offset spatula to smooth it out and add some dripping down the cake. I usually like to be very precise with my drip cakes, so I decided to just take a chance on adding the ganache in a different way to try to make it look more messy – like it would in real life when an ice cream cone falls onto the ground.
Next, using the same sprinkle finger technique from earlier, I added some of the extra sprinkles that were in the bottom of the cake containers. I was so happy that I decided to keep these because I loved it so much more with the added sprinkles on top of the ganache!
Finally, I added the waffle cone at an angle and gently pressed it into the ganache and cake pop so that it would stay when everything set.
And there we have our ice cream fault line birthday cake make from grocery store cakes!
Thank you so much for checking out this post! Leave a comment to let me know how you enjoyed this cake!
