Rainbow Birthday Cake

I'm back! I haven't had the internet for the past few months hence my absence, but I have now moved into an amazing new place with a bigger and better kitchen so will be doing lots more baking/blogging.

American rainbow cake is a cake that I have wanted to make for so long, I love how fake and ridiculous the colours are. So I invested in some gel colours, these are so highly concentrated that you genuninely only need to use the tiniest amount. So although it seems that anything that brightly coloured must be so incredibly bad for you, it actually hasn't had that much added to it, thus justifying me spending £20 on food colouring...No?

I wanted to debut the colours on a special occasion, so what could be better than my joint birthday party weekend with one of my besties Miss Annie Leith.

I started by making a basic cake mix, and then divided it into 6 seperate bowls to colour it. I had to bake each layer individually which was a bit annoying, and it was quite hard to get the temperature and baking time right for such thin layers, bit of trial and error, I reckon I could get they layers more even next time!

I wanted to get a good contrast to the colours so decided on a cream cheese frosting, I love how white it is and it also always feels really luxurious, a good mix between cheesecake and cake!

When I stacked it up I suddenly realised just how tall it was going to be, I had to feed 11 people so wasn't concerned about the amount of cake but rather the height, it had to travel 100miles to the lake district in the back of my car!

I did a crumb coat of the frosting first with the intention of icing it properly when I got there, I really wanted to hide the colours so that everyone in the car would still be surprised when I cut it open and it seemed to work!

It got there in one piece! (infront of the mountain of booze we had for the weekend)

When decorating it I also wanted it to be quite simple on the outside, so I reigned myself in and stuck to a really basic smartie decoration, plus I got to eat the leftovers, always a bonus.

The big reveal! When Annie and I cut it open (wedding style, obviously) everyone was screaming at the rainbow interior so it was definitely a success!

A happy birthday girl.

And the carnage that was left! Oh, and it tasted good- a secondary concern.

Soph x