I decided to make one of these for Matthew's end of year/Christmas party tomorrow morning after seeing my friend Christine post a picture of the rainbow cake she made for her husband's birthday. It looked so pretty that I thought I've got to give that a go!
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For the Cake...I tried looking for White Cake packet mix but couldn't find it so I used a simple white cake recipe which I had handy. This make a nice dense buttery cake. The ingredients below is enough for 3 layers of the rainbow cake, so I whipped up two batches of batter to complete one cake (6 layers). I did it in two batches cos it was far easier for me to contain the mess in my small kitchen - you can whip up one batch of cake batter, just double the quantities below.
1 cup sugar
125g butter
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla essence
1 1/2 cups All purpose flour
1 3/4 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup milk
preheat oven to 180 degrees. Line and grease 3 round cake tins, either 7 or 8 inch round tins will yield a lovely result.
1) with an electric beater, beat the sugar and butter until nice and fluffy. Add in eggs one at a time and stir in vanilla essence.
2) add the baking powder to the flour and combine with the wet mixture. Add in milk.
3) now that the batter is ready, divide the mixture in to 3 equal portions.
4) colour the batter purple, blue and green.
5) pour or spoon into the cake tins and bake for approx 20-25mins or until a cake skewer comes out clean.
Repeat steps to make the yellow, orange and red cake layers.
Once you are done with the baking you might need to trim the cake with a long serrated knife to ensure that each layer of the cake is nice and level. A small note about food colouring, the best type to use is the 'gel' form, you need a whole lot less which means no bitter taste in the batter in order to achieve the right colour.
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For the Frostinga nice white frosting provides a nice contrast again all the lovely colours of the cake. For my cake I also decided to use cream cheese but with WAY less sugar (the tasty kitchen recipe calls for 5 cups of confectioner's sugar!!!) and I also like to add the juice of one lemon to make a lovely sweet lemon cheese frosting.
4 x 250g of Philedelphia Cream Cheese
1 1/2 - 2 cups of caster sugar
Juice of one lemon
Beat all the ingredients together until soft and fluffy.
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The assemblyThis is the fun bit, spread frosting between each layer of cake, repeat until you've got frosting between all 6 layers. It's helpful to check that each layer is level before moving on the next otherwise you'll have the Leaning Tower of Pisa on your hands. Cover top and sides of the cake with more frosting then decorate some more :)
Tada!!! I had a lovely time making this cake for Matthew.
