Rainbow Cake

Two words.

Rainbow. 

Cake. 

Two more words. 

Super. Exciting.

I made this cake for Charlotte's birthday and It was requested a while a go.

I used this vanilla cake recipe although I would recommend, if you want to make this cake, that you don't choose a combination cake recipe (where you fold in whisked egg whites at the end) as you have to mix the food colourings in quite a bit and you loose the air from the egg whites. I had the rather tricky job of measuring out all batter before the eggs then weighing the eggs so I got an even amount in each bowl. 

School girl error.

Soooooo this cake is actually not that difficult, although looks impressive so pretend to your friends it was. 

1. Weigh your mixing bowl and make a note of the weight.
2. Make your vanilla cake batter.
3. Weigh the bowl with the batter. Minus the bowl weight to get the weight of your batter.
4. Divide this by six.
5. Measure each portion into your six bowls.
6. Remember the rainbow - Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue and, for this purpose, Purple)
6. Mix in lots of food colouring - the brighter the better!
7. Grease and line two 8in round tins with baking paper.
8. In one tin pour in the batters, in the middle of the tin, one at a time, in the following order:

Red

Orange

Yellow

9. In the second tin do the same in this order:

Green

Blue

Purple

10. Bake for however long the recipe states, then remove from the oven and leave to cool.

Meanwhile.......

Make the icing.

Pomegranate and Lemon buttercream

230g butter
250g icing sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 drop pomegranate oil
pinch of salt
Colouring (I used claret gel colour - gel is best as it doesn't change the consistency of the icing too much)

1. Cream butter and sugar together.
2. Stir in lemon juice, oil and salt
3. Whisk with an electric whisk for 5 mins until deliciously fluffy

Note: Usually I wouldn't use something as difficult to find as flavoured oil, but they really are great, you only need the smallest amount for an explosion of flavour.

Assembling

1. Put one cake on a flat surface and cut off the dome to make the cake flat. The best way to do this is to hold a serrated knife parallel to the cake where you would like to cut. Hold it firmly. Put pressure on the knife and rotate the cake in to it. Do this to both cakes.

Here is a useful video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH-kMcdmqB8

2. Turn your first cake over so the perfectly flat part is on the top. Cover the top with icing and sandwich the other cake on top. Cover the whole cake with a thin layer of icing and put in the fridge for as long as possible, min 40 minutes.
3. Take the cake out of the fridge and cover in buttercream. By putting the cake in the fridge with a thin layer of buttercream you are making sure you stop the crumbs of the cake making your buttercream ugly.

Anyway if I haven't explained that well just search it on youtube, there are some great videos on how to layer cakes.

Happy Rainbows.