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princess bakery funfetti cake

princess bakery funfetti cake

Hey guys! It's my 29th birthday today!

It's scary to me that, although I'm turning 29, I still feel as nomadic and unsettled as I did when I was 21. After all, my move to New York will be my 9th move (and 4th state, and 10th apartment/house) within the last 5 years. I'd like to think that I've made some sort of progress in these last few years, but sometimes, I'm not quite sure if I actually have. This past year wasn't easy and taught me that I've still got a lot to learn — especially when it comes to my priorities and figuring out what's important.


But as a June baby, I'm lucky that I get to have a birthday in the middle of the year. Especially since I treat my birthdays the way most people treat New Year's Day — a chance to look at what went wrong over the last year, make resolutions, and reset. This year, that means basically starting over from the quiet, career-focused life I regressed to since moving to San Francisco. I don't have anything too specific in mind, but I do know that a) I want to leave this city ASAP (and that's happening so soon, so yay!) and b) I want this year to be less stressful and funner than the last.

And what better way to kick off that goal than with a lighthearted and whimsical cake?


For this cake, I channeled my inner Coco Cake Land and whipped up this funfetti cake with strawberry cream cheese frosting. The funfetti cake recipe is actually one of Molly's and has been on my blog before — I made it almost two years ago for my third blogiversary and it was just SO DAMN GOOD that I've just been waiting for an opportunity to make it again.


And this time around, I swapped the vanilla flavor used in the original recipe for "Princess Bakery" extract. Princess Bakery is a legit flavor that comes in a bottle and tastes of vanilla, citrus, and almond. It's lovely and the flavor that all your homemade bakery style baked goods have been missing. I used Tessa's ombre frosting technique to create a "dip-dye" effect on my cake, with half the cream cheese frosting flavored with a fresh strawberry puree. I then topped it all off with cotton candy because it's my party and I can do what I want.

So 29 — here I come!

• This recipe uses a couple of weird ingredients: Princess Bakery emulsion and ground vanilla bean powder. Both are available on Amazon and are worth sourcing — it's what makes this cake special! However, if you just want to make a cake with ingredients you'll likely already have on hand, feel free to use Molly's original recipe with either 2 tablespoons clear vanilla extract or my version with 1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract.


• To get the dip-dyed look, I took my batch of cream cheese frosting and stirred in a few teaspoons of strawberry puree to flavor half the batch and dye it pink. I then used Tessa's ombre frosting technique to create the "dip-dye" effect with the regular cream cheese frosting and strawberry tinted batch. I really recommend using her tutorial (and checking out her cookbook!) as it's got some of the best step-by-step photos I've ever seen!


• If topping the cake with cotton candy, be sure to serve the cake immediately — cotton candy hardens and shrinks almost immediately when it touches something moist (like frosting). I got my cotton candy from World Market, but you can also buy cotton candy from Or, if you want to splurge and get the stuff fresh, you can use a countertop cotton candy maker (which, not gonna lie, this is currently on my Amazon wishlist)!

get the recipe »

Available link for download