Rainbow Birthday Cake

A few weeks ago, I blogged about my youngest's birthday party and promised to tell you in a future blog all about how I made her rainbow cake. Well, since then we've all been put on social distancing and lock-down and possibly even quarantine in some places, thanks to the corona virus, so I imagine birthday parties all over (and other social functions) are being canceled right and left.  Because of this it may seem strange for me to choose to blog about a birthday cake recipe, but people are still having birthdays, social distancing or not, and who knows? Maybe a big, colorful, fun cake may be just the thing to cheer you up on your birthday! (Although I warn you--this is a big cake; it's best to share with friends. 😊)

If nothing else, you can save the recipe for sometime in the future when you're able to share it with friends and family.

To make this cake, you need either three cake mixes or three batches of homemade cake batter. I chose to make mine from scratch because I'm currently experimenting with the best homemade vanilla cake recipe--not quite there yet, but I think I'm close. Regardless, the cake is six layers tall because a rainbow has at least 6 colors, so you're gonna end up with a lot of cake!😋

It doesn't really matter what kind of cake you make--vanilla, white, etc.--but it does need to be a light-colored cake so that you can dye each layer a different color. Mix up your batter(s) and divide each batch between two 9" cake pans. Now come's the fun part: coloring the batter. Curly had a lot of fun helping me with this part!

For our food coloring, we used Wilton gel food coloring--red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. For the lighter colors, it only took one toothpick of gel coloring, but the darker colors required two or three toothpicks of gel coloring before I was satisfied with the color. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of the last two batches, the purple and the blue, but you can see what the other colors looked like before I baked them.

Once all six layers are baked, it's time to assemble the cake. Here's where my high school science comes in handy to make sure the rainbow looks right! ROYGBIV, anyone? You can use whatever you like between the layers; I chose to use some strawberry filling I had on hand in between each layer. For the icing, I combined whipped cream, cream cheese and powdered sugar to make a whipped cream icing because I wanted the outside to look all fluffy like a cloud. It tasted good, too!

Finally I piped swirls (?), puffs (?), whatever you call them, around the bottom and top of the cake and sprinkled rainbow sprinkles on the puffs, and voila! Finished cake!

For the finishing touch, I used blue, yellow, and pink candy melts to make chocolate flower lollipops to place on top of the cake. Those were a big hit among the kids, let me tell you!

The cake itself was very good, I thought, though my husband refused to eat any! He said cake was just not supposed to be green or blue! 😂😂 The only problem I had with it was that I really didn't think the texture of the cake was just right. I had used vanilla pudding mix in my recipe, and it reacted with the milk in the batter to give the cake a kind of almost jello or pudding texture (another reason Jimmy refused any--he said it was like soggy bread! 😄). It didn't really bother me or anyone else that I noticed, but I think the next time I make vanilla cake, I'm gonna leave the pudding mix out and just add more vanilla, if need be. The recipe at the bottom does not include vanilla pudding mix, in case you're wondering.

So there you are. Technically, this was a very simple cake to make, and the combination of the vanilla cake, strawberry filling, and cream cheese icing was delicious! I hope you try it sometime, and I hope everyone stays safe and healthy! Have a great day!