The rainbow cake: how I avoided a baking failure with piping

I’ve always wanted to write a food blog and what better place to start than with my son’s birthday cake? (It’s a good place because I can show off with huge, impressive pics). Picture me donning a chef’s hat and an apron as we go through this one.

I asked Little Pencil what cake he wanted for his birthday at pretty much the same time I had been raving through a gallery of stunning rainbow cakes so when he replied that he wanted all the colours of the rainbow I wasn’t that  surprised. I can be rather persuasive … I was a little nervous that although I could see the finished product in my head, the things that I bake seldom come out the oven the way they come out of my head.  But this one worked (because of a sneaky trick I’ll let you into when we get there)

So to make the muli-layered rainbow cake:

Cream the butter (250g) and the sugar (1 1/2 cups)

Add 4 eggs – one at a time, beating inbetween

Sift 3 cups of flour and 2 teaspoons of baking powder and add bit by bit alternating with 1 cup of milk

Beat it all together.

and now the exciting bit… add a bit (okay a lot) of food colouring. Just one colour per portion of batter. I actually divided the batter into 2 parts and coloured on red and then one orange (red and yellow food colouring mixed). Made another cake -separated it into 2 – made one yellow and one green, made another cake and made one blue and er, ate the other one.

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Okay. Now bake it for about 35-40 minutes at 180’C.

Then do it again a million times. Okay not a million but it will feel like it. I did it three times as explained above so  that in total I had 5 cakes (we decided against 7 layers and stuck to the first five colours of the rainbow because, well just because we did.)

It is important to let each cake cool completely. When I say completely I mean in the fridge. It is MUCH easier to work with cake that’s been (for want of a better word) hardened up in the fridge.  I then took a leveler which my very brilliant sister had bought me and tried to make the top of all the cakes level. I am not a good enough bake to understand why my cakes are always squiff.  The leveler is a wire cutting frame (costs about $6) and is very easy to use. But my cakes were small (used half the batter per cake) and trimming them level was a little tricky because I was scared I would be left with pancakes.

So in the end my cakes weren’t as flat as could be and when I stacked them on top of each other with some butter icing between they looked really bad

But that’s where the tricky trick comes in. Icing. And piping. I knew that if I just tried to ice the cake there would be big rivets where the cakes didn’t line up and there would be crumbs (in technicolour everywhere).  So I filled an icing bag with icing and attached a big nozzle and then went around the cake piping the sides.  When they were all piped I spread the icing with the knife and Ta Da

This is how the cake looked when it was cut (I had to write Happy Birthday on it at my son’s insistence and stick in the very boring candles that my husband purchased)

and here’s a slice for you

I recommend against anyone eating that much sugar or food colouring but it looks really good

xx