Rainbow Cake

My sister has been nagging me for years and years to make her a 7 layered rainbow cake! However we never had enough people about to eat a 7 layered cake and so I tried making alternatives! I made a tie dye two layered cake one year, I made an ombré cake another year and then I think I just asked her to pick three colours out of the rainbow that she liked. They were good cakes but I could tell she wouldn’t be happy until I baked her what she really wanted! This year I had the opportunity to make her a rainbow cake...however we compromised and did 6 instead of 7 - there’s not really that much difference between indigo and blue anyway!!! The recipe I used again came from the old faithful - Cupcake Jemma! Google her for the full recipe!

This cake, surprisingly, didn’t take as long as I thought it would but I made sure that I had two days to make it. I baked all 6 layers on the first day, let them cool and then leveled them! The only unfortunate thing about the baking process was that I only have 4 8” sandwich tins not 6 so I had to make and bake two cakes at a time. Which meant doing the same task 3 times!! By the third time I was on a roll!!! The key to a rainbow cake is vivid colours, so put more than you think you need in because once the batters bake they will dull down about two shades lighter. I would recommend investing in a set of food colouring pastes, mine are Wilton ones. 10/10 would recommend to a friend! I have a set of 8 and they cost me about £10-£12 it seems expensive but they really do last a long time. Colouring paste is much better than the liquid food colouring because it doesn’t change the consistency of whatever you put it into. It’s also a lot more concentrated than the liquid so you don’t need to use as much colouring. I feel like Wilton should make me their spokesperson for food colouring gels - I love them so much!

Next came the leveling of the cakes. I’ve only leveled cakes a few times because I don’t really like having a lot of cake scraps but for a 6 layered cake it’s essential that you level the cakes so that it won’t be all lopsided when you stack and fill the cake! Dowels are also a good tool to use especially when the cake is taller than 4 layers. They just secure the cake better. Dowels are generally more used for tier cakes but there’s no harm in putting them in cakes that are quite tall! Leveling also gets rid of the caramelized outsides of the cake and allows for a more vivid colour to come through. This gives more wow factor when the cake is sliced.

Layering and decorating the cake is my favourite part of the cake baking process! I left this to the next day because it doesn’t take that long to make buttercream and it would take me an hour at the most to fill and layer the cakes. Beat the butter until it is almost white for really white buttercream. You want to do this for this kind of a cake so that when you cut it open the icing doesn’t take away from the colours. When layering it’s also important to make sure that the crumbs don’t get into the buttercream! That’s why crumb coat and chilling is so important. To carry out a crumb coat, simply coat the cake in a thin layer of buttercream and then put into the fridge until the buttercream has chilled completely (it’ll be firm to the touch and not come off on your finger). I decided to keep the cake pretty simple on the outside. I just put a thicker layer of buttercream around the cake after it had chilled completely and then smoothed it out and made some upward strokes with the palate knife around the side of the cake. I crumbled up some of the cake scraps and put them around the circumference of the top of the cake. This provided a pop of colour.