Rainbow Cakes

Rainbow Cakes

I recently made a rainbow cake for a cute little girl's birthday and I took some pictures of the process along the way.  In case you haven't seen one of the thousands of rainbow cake tutorials already on the internet, here is mine.

Tie-Dye Rainbow Cake

This cake was a sheet cake done in the "tie-dye" style of rainbow with a half-round on top done in the "Martha Stewart" style of rainbow cake.  For the sheet cake, I first filled my pan with water up to the point I would usually fill with cake batter.  Then I poured that into a measuring cup to know exactly how much batter I would need.  Since I was using 6 colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue & purple), I calculated how much batter of each color I would need.

Instead of dividing the batter into equal portions, I used more for the bottom 2 and less for the top 2 with the middle 2 being somewhere in between.  Reason for this is that the bottom layers will spread out more and become thinner as shown in the following pics:

              Just take your first color and pour into the middle of your pan. Let it spread a little then add your second color right on top of it.  Then continue with the rest.  The colors underneath will continue to spread as you pour each successive color on top.

That's it-then just bake as you normally would.

Layered Rainbow Cake

For the Martha Stewart layered style rainbow cake, I divided the colored batter into 6 equal portions.  I baked each layer separately in the round cake pan.  The layers will be skinny (short) because you are only using a fraction of the batter for each "layer" that you normally would use.  Here is what the layers look like once out of the oven and cooling on a sheet pan:  

Once they have cooled, stack with frosting between each layer.

The birthday girl's mom sent me a pic of the cake once it was cut, so here you can see what the sheet cake part looked like:

Give one of these rainbow techniques a try sometime when you want to create a bit more colorful cake.  Note:  I used Wilton's paste colors (not liquid food color).  You can find these now at most Walmarts. You can also get them at Michaels.