Ombre cake

I have seen many ombre cakes on Pinterest and decided to make a four layer cake for a family birthday celebration. I decided to go with four shades of teal and use two boxes of white cake mix.

When it comes to cake mixes, I am a fan of Duncan Hines but when I shopped, the store didn't have Duncan Hines white, I bought Betty Crocker mixes instead. Here are the tinted batters (I used Teal by AmeriColor) in the pans.

I should have photographed the layers on the cooling racks. I have never had such flat layers in all my years of baking. I had been expecting to trim almost half of each layer to limit the overall height of the cake to fit within my cake carrier, but there really wasn't much to trim, just the slight crowning that is typical. Here are the trimmed parts on a plate, showing the baked colors.

I used an oven thermometer to check the accuracy of my oven temp. I don't know if my results are typical of Betty Crocker mixes, typical of just white cake mixes that use the egg white but not the yolk, if I had two "bad" boxes of mix, or if something unrelated was to blame.

Normally I make my own buttercream frosting and would have piped large stars or swirls in rows of deepening color on the cake. I did make one batch of buttercream and used it between layers and thinned as a crumb coat, but the frosting you see here is canned frosting. Some days interruptions, bad luck in the kitchen and weather conspire to make short cuts necessary if one desires to maintain some degree of sanity and get to a party on time. I tinted canned vanilla icing four shades of teal, the lightest being the top of the cake which doesn't look much different in this photo. Canned frosting doesn't pipe well so I just painted bands of color onto the cake with a small spatula and blended away.

Not what I had in mind, but not atrocious. How's that for a rousing endorsement?

Here is the cut view of the ombre cake which the birthday girl loved.

All's well that ends well for the birthday event, but I am still left wondering why the layers baked so flat.