How to make a Rainbow Cake

Rainbow cake is perfect for a baby or child's birthday, is fun to make and eat and not even too difficult! Six/seven layers of sponge in every colour of the rainbow and a great suprise once you cut into it!  A rainbow theme makes a perfect first birthday idea for a little boy or girl.

For Dylan's first birthday I had some very ambitious plans.  Having never made a cake before by myself, I set the goal of a six layer rainbow cake to go with the rainbow theme I was planning.  Here are a few things I learnt:

-Always make a practice layer.   It helps make sure the mix is right and that the colour comes out how you want it.

-Liquid food colouring will not cut it.  The paste is fantastic though and goes a long long way (I would recommend Sugarflair).

-Icing a 6 layer cake is not the easiest part!

-Don't be afraid to ask for help.  I tweeted and had so much advice and recipes and found this one particularly helpful 

So here is my recipe for rainbow cake.

16oz/450g butter

28oz/800g
sugar

1lb/900g flour

8 eggs

4 tsps vanilla essence

6 tsps baking powder

500ml milk

food colouring paste

Mix the flour and baking powder and sift into the butter, eggs and sugar. (You need a huge bowl!)

Mix well and add the milk and vanilla essence until it takes that yummy cake mix texture. 

Put the mix into six separate bowls and add the food colouring.  You hardly need any paste to make a lovely strong colour and I bought only red, yellow and blue and mixed them.

Bake each mix in a separate cake tin (obviously greased) for around 25 minutes at 175 degrees C.  It took me two rounds of cooking as we have only 3 cake tins.

Allow them to cool down before stacking them.  I had to chop a bit off the top of each as they had risen too much.  I added buttercream in between the layers, and had to send the bloke out for a panic shop at midnight when I realised we had no icing sugar! - lesson of the day is be prepared!)

The bit I found hardest was icing the cake.  I couldn't work out what to do with the roll out stuff so I eventually did strips, attatching it to the cake with a very thin layer of butter icing.  It may have looked a little messy, but we all know it is what's on the inside that counts!  I decorated with edible red stars but there are so many options here!

 Serve cake and enjoy!