Pink Ombre Swirl Birthday Cake!

It's my 23rd birthday today! Yay! I'm pretty excited to see what this year of my life will bring. 

As a gift to myself, I decided to bake a birthday cake. I actually don't have any pictures of  the process except a phone pic of the colored batter but here's the recipe for those who would like to try it out.

Ingredients:
-1 cup of unsalted butter
-2 cups sugar
-4 eggs
-1 1/2 cups self rising flour (or 1.5 cups regular flour + 2 1/4 tsp. baking powder + 3/4 tsp. salt)
-1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
-1 cup milk
-2 (or 3) teaspoons vanilla extract
 *1/2 cup vegetable oil (to make it moist, otherwise it turns out a bit dry)

**I doubled up the recipe because as you'll see shortly, I made a pink ombre cake.

Directions for cake:
-Grease & flour cake pan
-Cream butter til smooth
-Add sugar and beat til fluffy (about 2-3min.)
-Add eggs 1 at a time, beating after each addition
-Combine the flours and add in 4 parts, alternating with the milk and vanilla extract. beating well after each addition
-Divide batter in bowls and add different amounts of coloring to create different shades of pink
-Pour into baking pans
-Bake 20-25 minutes at 350F
-Let cakes cool
-Stack layers together "gluing" them together with a thin layer of frosting.

The recipe for the frosting can be found in this blog. Now let me tell you, this is hands down the best frosting recipe ever. I've used this recipe countless times and have gotten so many compliments on how good it is.
*The only change I made was that instead of 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract, I used 2.
*Also, I doubled the recipe (I would actually recommend to triple the recipe so you won't run out of frosting like I did)
*I also divided the frosting into 4 bowls to create 4 different shades of pink

 Directions for frosting the cake:
-Frost the entire cake with a thin layer of light pink or white frosting (I didn't do this because knew I would run out of frosting if I did, and I was out of butter and powdered sugar to make more frosting. So, if you look closely you can see little brown gaps).
-Using a Wilton 1M tip make big rose swirly shapes by swirling the frosting starting in the middle of the rose, going outward in a clockwise direction.
-Make the bottom row the darkest shade and make the following rows lighter as you go up.
-Once you reach the top, do the same for the top of the cake using the lightest shade of pink. And that's it! Hope you enjoy your ombre cake as much as I did mine!

P.S. This is how it looks on the inside. Pretty, huh?