Over the rainbow

Bryony had seen a rainbow cake in some shop window or magazine a while ago and had not stopped talking about it. It was fabulous she said and just what she wanted for her 20th Birthday cake this year. Well, I thought it didn't look too hard to do so why not. Foolishly therefore I agreed to take on the job. It was however much harder than I thought particularly when I ended up having to make the cake at my mums house.  My mother has never liked cooking so I found I had no weighing scales no baking tins hopeless colouring stuffs and an oven I was not only unfamiliar with but, which I discovered baked unevenly.

Despite these problems I did manage to create a cake though not exactly a rainbow I think it turned out pretty darn good. If you want to give it a try here's what you'll need

Bryony with candles blazing

Ingredients

525g Unsalted Butter

525 g Caster sugar

9 Eggs

3tsp Vanilla extract

525g Self raising flour

3tsp Baking powder

3tbsp Apricot jam

Food colouring rainbow colours

Icing

1Pkt Philadelphia Cheese

1kg Icing sugar

This mixture will make up all seven layers of the cake. If it is easier you can divide the mixture so you can make up 4 layers of the cake from each half of the mixture. Yes you may have noticed you get a spare layer you can eat at you leisure a sort of taster. Dividing the mixture in this way enables you to have sufficient oven space and you can reuse your tins.

Method

Preheat oven to 180^oC 350⁰F Gas mark 4.

Cream butter and sugar together until butter has gone pale.

Add eggs and vanilla extract.

Whisk mixture thoroughly then add flour and baking powder.

Add food colouring I recommend the gell colourings you rather than the old fashioned colouring liquids you can get from supermarkets. The gells give an intensity of colour you simply cannot get from the other food dyes. I used a mix of food dyes and found for example colours blue and green were very tricky, using the old fashioned food dyes. Indeed, once cooked both appeared to have changed in colour, the blue went greyish and the green very yellow.

 

Divide evenly into tins and cook for 20minutes.

    

Once cooked cool on a wire tray

Allow to cool then sandwich layers together in order of the colours of the rainbow. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue Indigo, Violet.

Please note due to changes in colour of cakes whilst cooking I did not get the full rainbow effect though I think the end result is still most effective.

Once the layers were assembled I covered the whole cake in the icing and then decorated the cake.

The finished cake with decoration

Showing the cross section

 

I think the finished result is fab even if not quite as initially intended. I hope you all like it and give it a try. I am now thinking what else I could do.