If you’re on Pinterest, you’ve seen this cake before. I finally had a great reason to make one. Lucky me! It’s always so much fun to bring treats to my friends at New Day Northwest.
If you’ve wondered how difficult they are to make, wonder no more. It’s super easy and really fun to do.
Use two white cake mixes and follow the instructions on the box. After the cake mix is well mixed, just divide the batter into 6 smaller bowls. You can put about 1 1/2 cups of batter in each bowl.
Stir one color of the rainbow into each bowl of batter. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, yellow. I learned from an audience member after the show that I left out indigo, so if you’re making this cake for science class or as a gift for a precocious weatherman, you may want to be sure to include indigo. If you’re going for a bright rainbow cake like this one, I have a couple of little tips for it to turn out well…
- Use Wilton brand food coloring. You can find this at Michael’s Craft Store (and most other craft stores too). Why Wilton? Because Wilton food coloring is more like a paste. It won’t thin out your cake with liquid, keeping your cake fluffy. Yay for fluffy.
- Use more than you think you will need… sometimes when food coloring hits the oven, it fades. If you’re going for a pastel cake (awesome for baby showers and princess parties) then that’s great, but if you’re going for “Whoa, double rainbow” cool, you need bright colors.
Use an 8-inch pan. Thankfully, I own two, so this project takes me just three bakes. Coat each pan with Pam Baking Spray (different than regular Pam Spray) or coat pans with butter and then flour. This will make for easy release of your sexy cakes.
Follow the baking instructions on the box. The amount of time to bake 1 1/2 cups of cake mix in an 8-inch pan is about 15-20 minutes. To test, touch the top of the cake to see if it springs back. If it does, it is ready to be removed from the oven.
Here’s the heavenly cream cheese frosting I used for my rainbow goodness. You can use whichever frosting you like, of course. I chose to make mine light blue with touches of white to look like the sky. Rainbow sprinkles would be all kinds of adorbs on the outside too. Be sure to post your rainbow cake on our Facebook wall. We love to see your pictures!
Cake Decorating Tips:
- Cool, wrap each layer in plastic wrap, and then freeze the cake until firm before frosting. This will help prevent crumbs for step two.
- Trim a little bit off the top of each cake so it is level. This will make your cake more stable.
- Frost cake lightly & layer as you go (don’t worry about crumbs) and then place on a cake plate in the freezer again to firm up the frosting. This will prevent inevitable crumbs from showing on your final coat of frosting. Think of it as the primer paint.
- Frost outside of cake over your “crumb coating’.
Happy St Patrick’s Day. To celebrate, let’s have some Bailey’s Irish cream and double rainbow together, shall we?