10 amazing photos: Rainbow explosion cake inventor Amirah Kassem has tasty new book

Colorful Amirah Kassem, founder of Flour Shop in New York City, has baked up a book all about cake, “The Power of Sprinkles.”

Her first book (Abrams, 224 pp.), out Tuesday, is filled with confections including the shop’s famous rainbow explosion cake – a six-layer vibrant confection, which, when cut into, unleashes candy and sprinkles like a busted-open piñata. It also includes recipes for impostor cakes decorated to look like pies, donuts, cereal, a bucket of popcorn and more.

Kassem, a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, left the fashion industry in 2012 to bake full time.

In “The Power of Sprinkles,” she acknowledges the move was “a huge risk,” adding she didn’t attend culinary school.  

“I was never trained by a pastry chef,” she writes. “I’d never even worked in a kitchen! I had no idea what I was doing, but I had my mother’s recipes in one hand and sprinkles in the other, and I was ready to make my empire from scratch.”

Kassem viewed her formal training deficiency as an advantage, allowing her to “bake outside the box.” As she observes, in a museum "no one's coloring inside the lines. 

“The person going the craziest on the canvas is the most fun and memorable!” she writes. “There’s obviously a method to the madness.”

And her method has led to making sweets for Katy Perry, Snoop Dogg and the Kardashians.

For a taste of the creations featured in “The Power of Sprinkles,” see the gallery above.

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