Funfetti Cake

This homemade funfetti cake is soft and fluffy with colorful sprinkles and finished with thick bakery-style vanilla buttercream frosting.

Prep Time20

Cook Time23

Total Time43

Course: Dessert

Cuisine: American

Keyword: Funfetti Cake Recipe

Servings:

Calories: 1203kcal

Ingredients

Funfetti Cake

¾ cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1 ½ cups granulated sugar
2 ½ cups cake flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
4 large eggs, room temperature
1 cup whole milk
½ cup sour cream
¼ cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
⅓ cup rainbow jimmies sprinkles, plus additional for garnish

Vanilla Buttercream Frosting

3 cups salted butter, room temperature
10 cups powdered sugar, sifted
1 ½ tablespoons vanilla extract
½ cup heavy cream

Instructions

Funfetti Cake

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spray three 8-inch round cake pans with non-stick baker’s spray and line with parchment rounds.
To the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment add the unsalted butter, granulated sugar, cake flour, baking powder, and salt. Mix on medium speed for 1-2 minutes or until the mixture resembles coarse sand.
In a large spouted measuring glass, whisk together the eggs, whole milk, sour cream, vegetable oil, and vanilla extract until well combined.
With the mixer on low, slowly add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients. Stop the mixer and scrape the bowl and paddle then resume mixing just until the batter is smooth and well combined.
Fold in the sprinkles just until evenly distributed.
Divide the batter evenly between the prepared cake pans. Bake on the center rack for 23-25 minutes or just until lightly golden around the edges and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
Allow the cakes to cool in the pans for 5 minutes before turning them out onto a wire rack, remove the parchment from each of the cakes and allow them to cool completely before assembling and frosting.

Vanilla Buttercream Frosting

To the bowl of a large (7-8 quart capacity) stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter on medium-high speed for 2-3 minutes or until light and fluffy. This is a large amount of butter, so you may need to stop and scrape the bowl and paddle half way through to ensure even mixing.
Reduce the speed to low, slowly add the powdered sugar until all the powdered sugar has been incorporated into the butter. Scrape the bowl and paddle as needed to ensure all the ingredients are well incorporated.
Increase the speed back to medium-high and beat for 1-2 minutes until smooth and fluffy.
Add the heavy cream and vanilla extract, start on low speed until all the heavy cream has been incorporated, then increase the speed to high and beat for another 3-4 minutes or until the frosting is very light and fluffy. You will need to stop and scrape the bowl and paddle as needed to ensure that the frosting is evenly, and well, beaten.
To a large piping bag fitted with a large piping tip, add 1 ½ -2 cups of the frosting to pipe decorative dollops onto the cake if desired for decorating your assembled cake. The remainder of the frosting will be used to frost the cake.

Assembly

Place one cake layer onto a serving plate. Using a long serrated knife, level the top if there is a slight dome in the center. This will ensure even layers and a leveled cake when frosting.
Add approximately 1-1 ¼ cups of frosting to the cake and spread to an even layer. Place the second cake layer onto the first, add another 1-1 ¼ cups frosting and spread to an even layer.
Place the final cake layer onto the cake, frost the sides and top of the cake with the remaining frosting.
If piping on decorative dollops onto the top of the cake, do so before garnishing the top of the cake with additional sprinkles, slicing and serving.

Notes

If you plan to pipe on decorative dollops of additional frosting around the outer edges of the frosted cake, you will want to make 1.5x the recipe for vanilla buttercream frosting. This will ensure you have plenty of additional frosting to add to a piping bag, fitted with a large piping tip, to decorate the top of your cake before adding additional sprinkles.
A good quality brand of rainbow jimmies sprinkles, such as Betty Crocker, are best to use in this recipe to ensure the least amount of color bleed when mixed with the wet cake batter and baked.
Non-peril sprinkles (the little round rainbow colored ball sprinkles) will often bleed their color coating a lot when added to a wet batter and they do not soften well when baked. For these reasons I highly recommend sticking with the use of the rainbow jimmies sprinkles for this cake.
A reversed creaming process was used for this moist tender cake batter. When the butter and dry ingredients are mixed together first, the butter coats the flour so that when the wet ingredients are added, the gluten will not develop as much. Overdeveloped gluten can yield a dry, tough cake when baked.
Using full-fat (whole) milk and sour cream will yield the best results for this cake.
The use of salted butter balances the sweetness level of the vanilla buttercream frosting. If using unsalted butter, be sure to add 1 ½ teaspoons fine sea salt to the frosting when adding the heavy cream and vanilla extract.
This recipe yields a bakery-style quantity of frosting, which allows for the thick layers and decorative piping. You can easily halve the recipe and still have enough to frost the cake. However, you will need to be mindful that your layers of frosting will not be as thick and you will not have enough to add the decorative piping. If making a smaller batch, a standard sized stand mixer will work just fine for this amount of frosting.
If you do not have a large (7-8 quart capacity) stand mixer, you will want to halve the recipe and make two batches of frosting so that you do not overwork your mixer and so that all the frosting can easily be mixed well in a smaller mixer bowl.

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