rainbow cake (n)

– the soon to be four year olds answer to “What kind of cake do you want for your birthday?”

My warning to all of you thinking of attempting this process. Hire a dishwasher if you don’t have one. Because you’re going to mess up a lot of dishes. Don’t do it when you’re stressed about a hurricane that may make landfall on your house. And, finally… use a lot of food color. A lot. Especially with purple.

Now, this cake was a teeny bit daunting. Not at all like my sisters wedding cake, though. And.. even I have to admit, it looked pretty cool once I sliced into it. Wanna see? Of course you do. I know you wanna see my dishes, too.

Okay… you can see how many dishes it dirtied up, too:

That was just part of it. There was a ton.

Now: how about some naked pictures? Of CAKE you people.

Get your mind out of the gutter. 😉

Another thing about this cake- I doubled the recipe… not sure why…and weighed my batter. 24 ounces I had. I needed 6 colors so I divided that by 6. I ended up with 4. So… I figured 4 ounces of batter per layer/color. Not sure what happened, but I ended up with an extra cake. And, yes- I took off the weight of the bowl. I’m not known for my excellent math skills, don’t ever let me cut up an appetizer to feed 3 people… I will mess it up. Just ask Kristy or Brandi.

So… when I give you this recipe. Maybe divide it by cups instead of weighing it. Just a thought… also go buy some disposable cake pans…much easier than having to wait for pans to cool, then wash them, etc,etc.

You know what I’m saying…

As for the dolphins… they were so easy. I rolled out fondant that was tinted blue, and used one of my ga-zillion cookie cutters to cut it.

My little one also had her very first day of pre-school the day after her birthday. That means I have 3 hours to myself every weekday.

What did I do the first three hours? A weeks’ worth of chores…what am I going to do next? Well, I have some classes scheduled in September, and a ton of new recipes for this site and The Domestic Mama site.

I realized it’s my first partial “day off” in four years, so you can bet when it gets chilly out I am totally going to take three hours and a cup of coffee and a good book and completely veg.

It’s amazing how big three hours seems right now.

rainbow cake

Recipe Type: dessert,cake

Author: adapted from the Fannie Farmer Baking Book

Ingredients

4 1/2 cups cake flour
5 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons salt
1 cup vegetable shortening
2 1/2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 1/3 cups milk
4 teaspoons vanilla
4 cups butter cream frosting
assorted food colors: red,orange,yellow,green,blue,violet

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350
Grease and line 5 8″ cake pans.
In a bowl, cream the vanilla, shortening, and salt and sugar.
Add the eggs, one at a time and mix well.
Combine the flour and baking powder.
Slowly mix in a small amount of the flour mixture, alternating with the milk.
When all the flour and milk is mixed in, weigh or measure batter.
Divide the batter by the number of colors you wish to have.
Measure each color/layer into a bowl and tint to desired shade.
Bake for 10-18 minutes, test by inserting a toothpick into the center of the cake, if it comes out clean it’s ready.by clean I mean not gooey)
Fill and frost with butter cream, working from top to bottom with the colors in this order:
purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.