Rainbow Cake

DD has always fancied making a rainbow cake. We have tried in the past and found that either the cake was pale and barely looked like a rainbow, or we had to use so much colouring that the cake tasted horrible!

As DD just came out as gay it seemed the perfect time to do this thing properly!

So I asked twitter who told me about gel colouring, specifically Wilton, when our local Hobbycraft let us down we turned to next day delivery from Amazon and on Sunday we grabbed our Mary Berry cook book and DD began her Great British Bake Off style fun. She decided that the recipe for a 4 layered cake was not good enough, so she doubled the quantities and made a 6 layer cake... it was HUGE!

Here is our step by step cake recipe.

Ingredients (these are what we used for 6 layers - double what is in the book)

16oz (450g) Butter (we actually used some Trex so we reduced this by 20%)
16oz (450g) Caster sugar
16oz (450g) Self Raising flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
8 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
Coloured gels

We bought ready made icing (frosting) because we are cheats!

Method.

DD creamed together the butter and sugar

 I whisked the eggs and she added them to the creamed mix, using sifted flour to ensure the mixture didn't curdle.
DD added the flour (sieved) and baking powder and mixed until the mixture was smooth.

 We separated the mix into 6 bowls and coloured each bowl with food colouring.
The gel colour was lovely and bright.

We only had 2 cake tins and anyway we couldn't fit 6 into the oven at once so we cooked in batches.
We used a baking time for the cakes of 20 minutes on gas mark 4.
We baked each pair of cakes and then set those to cool as we baked the next.
I think we had our oven at slightly too high a heat as the cakes sunk slightly in the centre (and no we didn't open the door! We have a glass door.) I think gas 3 would have been better - our oven cooks a little hot!

However, it didn't really notice once we stacked and iced the cooled cakes.

Ta da!

You will be pleased to know that the cake tasted delicious, and there was no taste at all from the colouring. Each slice however was so vast that it took all our cake eating powers to finish one...

DD was very pleased with the finish result, as were her friends when she took some slices into college! I don't think we did too bad! I think from start to finish the cake took about 3 hours to make.

Have you ever made rainbow cake? Pop over to my Facebook page and share your pictures! Or let me know on twitter.