Funfetti Buttermilk Birthday Cake

Our answer

A funfetti cake is a vanilla sponge that has sprinkles baked into the cake itself and Nigella's Buttermilk Birthday Cake (from HOW TO BE A DOMESTIC GODDESS) is likely to be a good base for this type of cake. The recipe itself is enough for a deeper single layer cake in a 23cm/9-inch squre tin or two layers using 20cm/8-inch round sandwich tins (cake pans).

You will probably need to use about 100g of sprinkles for the cake batter. The Buttermilk Birthday Cake doesn't contain a particularly high proportion of sugar and even though some sugar is added with the sprinkles, we would not really reduce the sugar in this recipe by much, maybe just 25g (2 tablespoons). As we have not tested the cake in this form we regret that we are unable to guarantee the results. You should also use the elongated type of sprinkles in the batter, rather than small, round nonpareils, as the colour from these sprinkles bleeds less easily. You may like to decorate the cake with a frosting that is not too sugary, such as the buttery cream cheese frosting from Nigella's Red Velvet Cupcakes. This quantity of frosting would be enough to squidge the two layers of a round cake together and ice the top.