Rainbow Cake

...so after a couple of months of not blogging, the first post to break the drought is going to about a cake. A rainbow cake.

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!

Hunting online produced this link from the tasty kitchen http://tastykitchen.com/recipes/desserts/rainbow-cake/  So pretty right???

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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 Frosting
a 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 assembly

This 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.

The Unusual Palate & Conversations of a 2 year old.

Matthew really has the most unusual palate for food for a 2 year old. Here are some of the types of food he LOVES.

pickled ginger,

Ikura salmon roe (we just call them eggs)

Roquefort cheese, from France no less.

Olives, any kind either green or black, marinated or spiced it doesn't really matter.

Balsamic vinegar

Serrano Ham
Coffee/Tea (he has the froth on top of Duncan's latte as the tiniest bit of caffeine sends him crazy)

I can't think of a single food that Matthew won't eat, even a bit of spice in a curry doesn't bother him which is great as it means we can dine pretty much anywhere.

Post Birthday lunch just the 3 of us, complete with Matthew's favourite Japanese foods.

I know I've mentioned in the past that Matthew vocabulary is expanding rapidly, and in fact we'd been warned that this is expected around the 2 year mark. But it's still very surprising and shocking to us that Matthew has suddenly gone from speaking 2 word sentences, babbling incoherently the rest of the time and singing random words to tunes he knows to conversing with us in 3-4 word sentences and sometimes more virtually overnight. Honestly, Duncan and I would tell you that it happened sometime overnight on Saturday right after his birthday.

Matthew said on Sunday morning;
'Mummy open the fridge'
and
'May I please have Jellybeans Mummy?
For a longest time, Matthew has been referring to himself as 'Moo Moo' which is my nickname for him and I'd thought that he had difficulty saying his name and words beginning with the letter 'M' but a few weeks ago managed to say 'Marshmellow' very clearly. On Saturday evening, on our way out to dinner, Matthew was not only say his name properly, but was singing 'Happy Birthday to Matthew' over and over again. When the parenting books say that kids can change overnight, they really mean it!