This year our daughter turned 6 and she wanted a "cake with rainbows...and also roller skates" because her birthday party was going to be at a skating rink with her friends.
I have seen various pictures of rainbow cakes on the internet for a while now and have been wanting for ages to have an excuse to try it, so I was happy to finally get a chance!
The "recipe" is really simple...it was just a matter of some extra time and lots of cleanup in the kitchen after. But so cool, and there were lots of ooohs and aaaahs from the kids when that first slice came out looking so unexpectedly beautiful!
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First, I wanted to start with a simple white cake. All the recipes I was finding in the books we have at home looked a little bit complicated, or they were more yellow cakes rrather than white, but I found a recipe online which I tripled to fit my big tube-pan that was super simple (and turned out to be really really yummy too) The original recipe was for a 9 inch pan but 3 of those worked out to be just perfect for my pan, even allowing for some batter-loss in this process when pouring this stuff into my cake pan.
Super Simple White Cake:
cream together:
- 3 cups white sugar
- 3 sticks of butter (1 1/2 cups)
then add:
- 6 eggs
- 4-6 teaspoons vanilla extract (honestly I got distracted at this part so it could have been as little as or as much as)
mix the dry ingredients and add to the batter mix:
- 4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 5 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
And the original recipe said to mix this in last, but Floyd told me that I was going to burn the gears on his stand mixer if I didn't add the liquid in so I mixed the milk in right away after adding the dry stuff and it worked out just fine.
OK so now we have the batter - next comes the fun part!
Divide into a bunch of different bowls and color with food coloring. I happened to have a stash of "neon and pastel" color gets on hand as well, from previous decorating projects, so this cake got the entire color spectrum from the rainbow!
Next we start pouring our batter, one color at a time, into the well greased tube cake pan - one on top of the next.
I wasn't perfect with it - just tried to have some of each color as even as I could get it across the top of the last layer.
When I was done pouring all the different colors, it looked like this:
Next it went into the over at 350 degrees (F). The original recipe had something like 30-40 minutes for a 9 inch cake pan, but since this was tall and more it took more like a little over an hour. I just kept checking it to see when a toothpick came out clean.
The cake came out looking like this: (By the way I have never figured out how to make a cake not crack like this, but *shrug* it's also a great excuse for extra frosting, and we are big fans of the creamcheese frosting so....)
Now the cake needed to cool and I wasn't going to frost it until the morning of the party, so this gave me time to make the roller skates out of marzipan, using some of those color dye gels while I had them out. I learned my lesson from the Lego cake from last years birthday cake for my son so and made sure that there were enough roller skates to give one to each kid:
I made some flowers with the stuff I had left-over too.
Now the next morning I made a big batch of the super delicious cream cheese frosting and instantly took care of any cake-crack blemishes and then piped the rest on for decoration.
(Frosting:
2 packages of 8 oz cream cheese + 2 cups confectioners' powdered sugar
2 packages of 8 oz. cream cheese + 2 cups powdered/confectioner's sugar - whipped with an electric beater until smooth.
Then add 1 cup heavy whipping cream and beat again until you have a spreadable consistency - DO NOT OVERBEAT! (I made butter one time letting that mixer go too long! haha)
Now look at this! Is this not the neatest thing?:
