Taste the Rainbow Cake!

Original challenge photo

 If you've met me, you know that I set pretty high standards for myself. You may or may not also know that I don't like to lose - I'm a little bit competitive and I don't like to say no to a challenge. Having said that, recently a friend posted an image to my personal Facebook wall. There was a simple caption with the image, which read. "Do you accept the challenge?"

I didn't think twice about it. Of course I accepted, informing him that he'd have to eat the cake once I'd made it. This was to be a six-layer, rainbow cake with white fondant and a meme on top. I created the meme in advance using gum paste. I coloured a portion of it black and left the remainder white to create the meme. Once it was ready, it was set aside to harden while I focused on the cake.

I used a basic vanilla cake recipe from Baking With The Cake Boss for this cake. The recipe suggested that it was enough cake batter to make two 9" round layers. Once I had the batter prepared, I divided it equally among 6 different bowls - this was about 3/4 cup of batter per bowl. Once I had the batter divided, I added a little bit of soft gel paste food colouring to each bowl. This was the first time I'd used these food colours and they were great! The colour was extremely vibrant and stayed vibrant once baked.

Once the batter was coloured, I sprayed the 9" cake pans with non-stick spray and then poured in the batter. Since there was very little batter for each colour, the cake layers took significantly less time to bake. I found that each layer only took 12-15 minutes. Because the layers are so thin, you want to be careful not to over bake them or they'll be dry. I started checking each layer around 10 minutes.

While the layers cooled, I prepared a butter cream icing (basic white, to accent the vibrant colours) to use to assemble the cake. As there were so many layers, I used a fine layer of icing between each so as not to have too much. Once the entire cake was iced, I covered the cake in white fondant, and then positioned the pre-made meme on the top.

I was pretty happy with how this cake turned out. Once we cut into it, the inside looked great. This was also much simpler to make than it looked, and was a hit with those who saw it. It would make a great cake for birthdays or other colourful events!