rainbow cake: part II

This post is for all those wondering how I made the rainbow cake for the princess castle cake I did last weekend. It really wasn't hard, just took some steps. After mixing up the cheapest some simple white boxed cake, I divided the batter into six bowls and mixed a different food colouring into each bowl. Take note that I didn't use your grocery store brand liquid food colouring, but the professional icing colour gels meant for cake decorating (like these). While I'm not normally a fan of food dye (especially for kids), there's just no way to get these kinds of vibrant colours with natural dyes.

They're even brighter when cooked. Serious.

these pictures weren't edited at all (not even white balance... ugh. sorry.)

It would've been better to bake each colour individually so I'd end up with six half cakes, but I only had to round pans and I didn't feel like spending all afternoon in the kitchen, pouring, filling, levelling, baking, cooling, removing, re-greasing, re-pouring... you get the picture. So instead I did two colours per pan. Below you can see a bit of the first colour peeking through around the edges.

Since two boxes of cake batter should have made four cakes, but I was only using three, I didn't want to fill the pans right up for fear of cleaning -albeit cheerfully coloured- cake batter out of the bottom of the oven. I used the leftover batter to make a square cake, pouring each layer into the pan as evenly as possible. I thought I might need this extra cake to build/repair parts of the castle, or if we needed extra cake for extra people, but ended up taking it to church where it was inhaled by some very excited, very amazed 3-9 year olds.

messy and pretty at the same time

The layers of rainbow cake made up the main body/section of the castle, while the towers were made of rice krispie treats. All in all, it was, yes a bit of work, but also a huge success.