Tutorial: Easy Rainbow Cake

NOTE: The following post was originally posted a week ago for just a few hours before Blogger crashed and deleted it. Fortunately, it was recently recovered back to my draft posts, so here it is again!

When you were a little kid, did your parents have a "special" cake, the one that got baked for all the special occasions, the one that you ALWAYS requested for your birthday or a celebration or any time that you got to be in charge of picking the cake?

When I was a little girl, Mammaw's chocolate chip bundt cake was THE cake.

For my little girls, I think that my rainbow cake is now the cake. We had rainbow cake last year for Sydney's birthday, and then for her birthday party--made sense, because her party theme was rainbows. This year, however, for Sydney's birthday, with a choice among all the cakes in the entire world--cookie cake, ice cream cake, chocolate cake, pink cake--her request was, again, for a rainbow cake.

Now, you can do a rainbow cake two ways: the easy way, or the hard way. I do the hard way for the birthday party, and the easy way for the birthday. The easy way still, obviously, takes more work than just buying a birthday cake from Sam's Club, but it's really not that hard, since you can even use a box of cake mix if you want, and the impact of the finished cake is giant.

Here's how to make rainbow cake the easy way, because you are definitely going to want to do this yourself. It's that fun:

Prepare a double batch of white cake using your preferred method. I have made white cake from scratch and have used white cake mix for this recipe--it works either way. If you're a total baking newb, however, double-check your cake mix box to make sure that you're buying white cake mix. When I was a total baking newb I brought both yellow cake mix AND white cake mix to my aunt, who was making a giant dinosaur cake for Will and needed two boxes of mix--she was not pleased.

I advise making a double batch of cake mix because you'll have more cake batter to dye, and so it'll be easier to work with as a whole. If you only need one cake or one batch of cupcakes, then just bake the rest and freeze it for later--rainbow cupcakes make a nommy breakfast treat!

Separate the cake batter into as many separate bowls as you want colors in your cake, and dye each bowl of batter separately, using a clean spoon for each:

For a traditional rainbow cake you want to go ROY G. BIV, but this is just a fun project for Sydney's birthday, so I let the girls choose any and all colors that they wanted.

I highly recommend using better-quality gel or paste food coloring for this project--the point is the carnival colors of the cake, and those colors are just more vivid with better coloring.

If you're making this cake yourself, as the adult, you can work a little more systematically from this point, but, especially if you're baking cupcakes (as I am here), this project is a fabulous one to let little kids do themselves from here. Especially for cupcakes, which cook fairly quickly, this would also be a fun party activity to allow little party guests to design their own cupcake.

Arrange all the different bowls of colored mix so that they're accessible, each with its own spoon:

Don't mix up the spoons!

Using the dedicated spoons, drop spoonfuls of cake batter into the cake pan however you'd like:

You can smooth out a certain color, of course, but don't stir, because you don't want to blend the different colors together--you've already eaten brown cake before, haven't you?

You can use this same cake technique for a full-size cake pan, a smaller individual cake pan, as Sydney has above, or for cupcakes:

 

When you're finished, bake as usual.

I think that you'll be really pleased with what you end up with:

The birthday girl seems pleased, doesn't she?

I wouldn't actually let her put her treasured cupcake IN her brand-new decorated treasure chest (thanks, Abby!), so on top had to suffice:

Stick around, because Syd has already requested a star-shaped layered rainbow cake for her star-themed birthday party this weekend, and so if I'm making a layered rainbow cake, anyway, well, then I might as well write a tutorial!

Here's the food coloring we used:

Here's Our Homeschool This Week

This week, we've:

played endless games of Sorry; built lots with blocks--

--and I mean LOTS with blocks--

--judiciously spent saved Christmas/birthday money at our local toy/educational supplies store (thanks, Papa!); put together one of those damn Playmobil sets according to instructions (bought at aforementioned store with aforementioned birthday money)--

--made pretty things with pattern blocks, both on the carpet and with translucent plastic pattern blocks on the overhead projector (both of those sets being brand-new school supply purchases from that same store, but by the Momma this time); watched Extreme Engineering; played briefly with our brand-new Cuisenaire rods(love that school shopping!); goofed around with a laser level; and cut out paper snowflakes. Syd played some Curious George online and with a dot-to-dot computer game; stamped with number stamps; and helped me make banana cookies, pancakes, rainbow cupcakes, and vegetable soup.

We spent plenty of time at PBSKids.com; spent plenty more time with books independently, especially my Will, who is a reading machine of late; visited the library a couple of times; watched a little Electric Company (the new version, not the old); had chapters from Nancy Drew and Just So Stories at bedtime; and listened to four or five of the Magic Tree House audiobooks. I can't even tell you the books that Will has devoured this week, but they include some Boxcar Children titles, 101 Dalmatians, some Magic Tree House titles, some Nancy Drew titles, some Shel Silverstein, and other picture books, chapter books, non-fiction, and poetry that she's come across.

The kids have taken many beautiful photographs on beloved subjects--

--played with Colorforms (another new school supply purchase); helped me paint some pretty paint in the basement; and attended a scrapbooking class at the public library--

--which was VERY well enjoyed. Syd decorated some frames for some maps I'm going to tack to the walls in their playroom--

--colored with Sharpies and crayons and colored pencils and whatever else she could find; masterminded the design and construction of her new skirt; and worked on some balancing butterflies, project still in progress:

Syd finished filling out her reading program form and submitted it to the library, earning herself a book as a prize. She also did some handwriting copywork for fun and helped me label stuff.

Will watched a LOT of Blue's Clues, sigh, and some Walking with Dinosaurs (or Walking with Prehistoric Beasts or Walking with Early Mammals, etc.); attended Critter Junction, an animal program at the local library; took care of the tadpoles, some teeny froggies, and the odd caterpillar or spider for a while; researched strawberry plants, rainbows, the ocean, giant sea turtles, and I don't even recall what else; and, big sigh, took a field trip to the Emergency Room and experienced the treatment for a cracked tibia, x-rays and hard cast 3/4 up the thigh and all. 

We played the rain stick and the recorder; listened to the Muppets and Throwing Muses and some seriously inane kids' music and other CDs; and had any number of dance parties. In addition, Syd's goal is to learn to whistle, so there's been much practicing of that, and even a screening of a documentary on the International Whistling Competition.

We began the timeline!!! We've added the epochs and some info on dinosaurs and human evolution; Will has big plans to cut up an extra Smithsonian dinosaur encyclopedia that we have on hand, and I still need to mark out some basic demarcations from early humans to the present so that we know where to put stuff. Will's also been into the short video clips on the Liberty's Kids web site, although she's very annoyed that I insist on supervising her visits there, since it contains outside advertising.

We walked and biked and scooted downtown and all around; helped with chores like grocery shopping and cleaning and gardening--

--went swimming; had boisterous playdates with good friends; picked blackberries and peaches--

--played on various playgrounds, including one magical maneuver on the monkey bars too many (CRACK!); and, most recently, practiced and practiced and practiced walking on crutches.

And that's how we homeschooled this week. Please, let next week be uneventful.

Rainbow Party Project #6: Rainbow Cakes Aplenty

Rainbow cake has basically been a week-long project. But yes, I am pleased to tell you that tonight, the night before Rainbow Party Day, the dream has been achieved.

Tonight, on top of the stove, rests a seven-layer cake waiting to be frosted and decorated with M&Ms on the morrow. Its layers, from top to bottom: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

Y'all, the rainbow cake is REAL!

But no, you can't see it yet. That would spoil the birthday party surprise!

A LOT of thought went into Rainbow Cake. I toyed with the idea of a straight-on rainbow cake, and was VERY inspired by the rainbow birthday cake over at ChocolateSuze, and her awesome rainbow Mario mushroon cake. But I really, really wanted a rainbow layer cake, and I just almost made the 20-layer rainbow cake, also at ChocolateSuze (I am still ABSOLUTELY going to make that one, just another time...).

Most of the 20-layer cakes that people post online are done with crepes, or otherwise very thin layers. So then I planned to just slice each layer in half horizontally, saving one half of each for a later date, but a very smart mom-friend of mine suggested that instead, I pour a small amount of batter into a regular 8" round pan and just watch it carefully to see when it was done. Done and DONE!

And that's how the rainbow cake was built: plain box of cake mix (on Manager's Special for 86 cents!), one cup of batter taken out and colored and spread into the bottom of an 8" round cake pan, cooked for 15 minutes. Perfect.

The girls, of course, were pillars of strength and sources of unending aid, and they also talked me into making an entire batch--24 cupcakes!--of rainbow cupcakes earlier this week just for them to eat. I'm still not sure what that was all about, but it certainly has not spoiled their taste for rainbow cake any, so it's all good.

And how nice to be able to rest my arm for a few of the 450 strokes called for in the recipe:

She learned to do silly voices while stirring from me.

The food coloring that we used is CRAP for your body--seriously, it's made entirely from high fructose corn syrup and those D&C dyes that make kids super-wild--but it's amazingly vivid, and we love it. And how many times have I told the children NOT to put it into straight into their mouths?

Many times. I have asked them not to do this many times.

We did do old-school rainbow for the cupcakes--yes, it's crazy, I baked a seven-layer rainbow cake and then two dozen rainbow cupcakes (well, I ate three, so 21 rainbow cupcakes), because I INVITE TOO MANY PEOPLE TO PARTIES. I need to feel loved, or something. Sydney helped with the cupcakes, in the most excrutiating manner imaginable:

Seriously, multiply that by seven colors and 24 cupcakes. My soul died an hour before we were done, but the child was filled with bliss, what can you do?

I love the randomness of the color when the cakes are ready to bake:

If we don't have our fill of rainbow edibles by the time this party is over tomorrow, it will NOT be for lack of trying on my part.