Cake at the end of the rainbow

Some times, after a period of sustained effort and focus, you just want to break out and do something a little crazy using as many e numbers as the human body can contain. That’s what I did.

It was Russ' birthday in August and normally I would make him a cake but on the day before his birthday we had a wedding of a couple of our friends so there was no time and I had no choice but to buy him one. I felt dirty. I felt particularly bad about it as well seeing as it was his first birthday as a married man and here I, his new wife, was already slacking on the duties and not making him a cake. Was it true? Does everything slip after the wedding? I had to make amends so I told him that I would make him anything that he wanted and what he wanted was a rainbow cake.

They're pretty straight forward really, just fiddly and there are a couple of things you need to get right to make sure that the colours are right. This gives you a 6 layer cake which feeds a million people if you cut it into tiny enough slices. A rainbow can feed the world.

I bake at 170 in a fan forced oven 180 if its not fan forced and do pre heat your oven, better yet get yourself an oven thermometer so that you know that when you're setting your oven at 180, it actually gets to 180.
Cream together 250g of butter with 2 and 1/3 cups caster sugar for about 7 mins or so til its all nice and fluffy then I add 5 egg whites. If I was just making a normal cake then I'd add 2-3 whole eggs instead of the egg whites but because I want the vibrant colour in this I just add eggs whites.
Add them a little at a time and beat in between additions so they're all nicely incorporated. I use an electric beater at the moment because I don’t have a fancy stand mixer but either works. If you do have a fancy stand mixer, I resent you slightly, but you can use either the whisk attachment or the paddle beater attachment, no one cares.
When I get to adding the flour I change to a spatula or spoon because the more you beat cake mix once you've added the flour, the tougher the mix will be which is not what you want, you'll still be stirring in the flour rather than folding it in like you do with a soufflé but its less aggressive than mixing it mechanically I find. It works for me but you see what works for you before settling on your preferred method.
Add in about 3 cups of flour and 1 teaspoon of salt in batches, you can use self raising or plain with the addition of 3 teaspoons of baking powder, purists go for the plain flour option, I think it depends on your brand of flour I'm not averse to just using self raising and not adding baking powder. I'm a rebel in a pinny.
Add in 1 and a half cups of buttermilk in between your flour additions. You can use normal milk but I find the buttermilk gives it a nice richness, the acid in it helps the rise of the cake and I prefer the texture too. Add in 2 teaspoons of vanilla if you want a vanilla cake otherwise you can just add little 1/4 teaspoons of other flavours once you've divided out the batter into 6 portions if you want to individually flavour each layer.
I find that if you divide the mixture out so you've got one cup of batter for each colour it divides up pretty equally.
I use gel colours to get the intensity of colour that I want for this cake. Mix in just enough til you get the tone of colour that you want, you only need a tiny amount with gel colours. The liquid colours just don’t give you the tone because you'd need to use a heap of them and end up watering down your batter.
Spread into your preprepared tins, I prepare mine by buttering them and then cutting out a disc of baking paper to stick in the bottom and that always sees me right
Should be about 15 mins in a pre heated oven. Test with a toothpick in the centre to make sure they're done and then ice them to your hearts content.
With mine I ended up using about 2 times my normal quantity of buttercream because you're filling each layer and its a pretty big cake, you could just as easily though not ice the outside just stack and fill and then you'd see the layers and have less icing. Its up to you my friends. Because this was such a huge cake I ended up slicing it and putting the slices on to paper plates which I then wrapped in cling film and froze so that Russ could have a slice of cake whenever he wanted and then the rest when to a good home with the guys at work. Have made this one a few times now as it was a bit of a winner and its been received really well each time. If you wanted a variation you could also adapt this by dividing out the recipe and then graduating one colour through the layers so the colour got a bit more intense with each one. That'd be cool.



Next up: By god these are good cookies.