Solar System 2-tone Cinnamon Chiffon Cake (naturally coloured with Blue pea flowers and Charcoal)

Happy 7th Birthday to my dearest firstborn! I made a Solar system chiffon cake for my future scientist/geek who loves these! I also worked hard on my planetary facts and tried my best to get their placement/size/design as accurate as possible hehe. So from the Sun, they are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupitar, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto. God is amazing at making all these!

My MIL gave me two packs of Ceylon grounded cinnamon (which they say are the best), so I tried out these on the cake. I added 1 tsp cinnamon powder to my usual vanilla chiffon cake recipe (below). The taste wasn’t that strong so I would recommend adding 1.5-2 tsp (which other recipes use) the next time. In my case, I didn’t dare add more as it created a lot of brown specks on the batter.

5 egg yolks
33g sugar
65g vegetable oil
70 ml water
8 ml vanilla extract
100g cake flour
1 tsp cinnamon powder (recommend adding 2 tsp in future)

7 egg whites
75g sugar
1/4 tsp cream of tartar

I divided the batter 1/3 and 2/3. I added 1 tsp charcoal powder and blue pea flower extract (35 flowers in 10 ml hot water) to the 2/3 portion and only blue pea flower extract to the 1/3 portion. I made the blue-black boundary curved to represent the halo from the sun. The final colour was a bit dull, so I painted the whole cake with more blue pea flower extract (now have an abundance thanks to my MIL). Lastly for the planets, I baked chiffon cake in round cake pop molds of different sizes and created stripes, marbling effect and patches by spooning in the batter differently.

My son had great fun distributing the planets and telling everyone about them yesterday! Thank God so much for helping him grow.

With lots of love,
Susanne