Rainbow Cake

I first saw this rainbow cake a couple of weeks ago and fell completely, hopelessly in love. I decided that one of my kids(and maybe even both?) WILL have it for their birthday cake this year! But it’s a lot of time – you have to refrigerate for 2 hours or freeze for 1 hour in between each of 8ish(depending how many colors you choose) layers to keep it from toppling and smooshing. That’s a lot of time, and I’m willing to do it for a birthday, but I wanted some rainbow fun for immediate gratification, too. So I shared the link with some friends and I was led to this rainbow cake and I figured it was a bit more up my alley time-wise over the weekend.

I cannot even begin to describe to you what joy this cake brought to a 2.5 year old – making it, testing batter, eating it – all of it was pure bliss to her! If you’re thinking of doing it with your kids, definitely do it. We mixed, divided, talked about colors, counted, watched it cook…so many fun things to learn!

The basic instructions: make cake batter(I used a box yellow because it’s what I had, I would have used white if we had any), split it into the number of colors you want to use, add the coloring, put half of each color in your baking pans layering each color directly on top of one another in the center.

A few tips:

-I *tried* to get creative and add a bit of white in between each layer, but it wasn’t the best idea – I’d advise against it.

-Use gel food coloring. I had never heard of it until recently when I started trying to make iced sugar cookies and then saw these rainbow cakes. I can’t believe the difference it makes! Great, saturated colors without thinning out batter or icing. I got them at Michael’s with a 40% off coupon. They’re also on Amazon, etc.

-I’m showing a weird picture with the blobs of food coloring below. That was the initial amount of gel food coloring I used and in all of them I wound up doubling that amount to get the color saturation I wanted.

-I frosted it with Magnolia Bakery’s Vanilla Buttercream(that’s not actually a buttercream.) Um, way.too.much.sweetness. That  frosting is just not my cup of tea at all, but that worked out for me since I didn’t really want to eat the cake much. Don’t get me wrong, I ate a bit;) Just not what I’d normally eat.

p.s. The ultimate rainbow cake:

Image as seen on Ohdeedoh, via Oh Happy Day from @dariusmonsef on Twitter

{Linking this post to Steady Mom’s Moms’ 30-Minute Blog Challenge -

23 minutes start to finish since I had the pictures ready!}