I spent a great portion of yesterday baking and building this eight-layer rainbow cake (not for Thanksgiving, but for my Dad's/sister's/brother's birthday celebration). I don't have any pics of the finished slice (which looked really, really cool) because that happened well after dark, outside, and about 5 miles from my camera. There are some pics on instagram though...if you go in for that instagram thing.
We've all seen reincarnations of the rainbow cake on Pinterest. However, when it came to the nuts and bolts of putting this cake together, there was very little in the way of details on the olde world wide web. I'll try to save you some trouble and tell you what I did:
- I made eight layers from two white cake mixes. I used approximately 1.25 cups of batter per layer.
- Use the gel food coloring...the neon kind works especially well.
- I (actually Madison) cut out parchment circles for the bottom of the cake pans. These, along with a bit of cooking spray, helped the thin layers to pop out of the pans relatively unscathed.
- I only have two pans! I baked two at a time for 9 minutes at .... whatever temp the cake box said.
- After the layers cooled I wrapped them in saranwrap and put them in the freezer for a few hours. This made construction much easier.
- Icing the cake required THREE batches of buttercream frosting. That means SIX sticks of butter. Yikes! Initially, I thought two batches would be plenty. But no. I definitely wouldn't recommend using cream cheese frosting. The cake gets pretty high and you need better holding power. Buttercream seemed to do the trick.
For decoration I left the cake pretty plain. I topped it with two tall skewers that held a rainbow pennant. Resist the urge to top it with too much stuff...because the reveal upon slicing is best when starting from a plain white cake. I'm telling you...it's surprising and spectacular and the layers look a little bit like play-doh. Seriously. Should you have 3-5 hours on hand...put it towards a rainbow cake. At this moment...there is not even a crumb left.
Hope your Thanksgiving is warm and tasty. As soon as I finish the post I'm off to get the car washed and loaded for our annual Thanksgiving road trip. Destination this year? Downtown Austin. I can't wait!!
Beautiful cake, beautiful Austin! I love it!. m
Posted by: Aunt Mary | November 23, 2011 at 12:38 PM
Oops! I forgot. Happy Birthday Carl, Jennifer, Luke. Love you. m
Posted by: Aunt Mary | November 23, 2011 at 12:40 PM