This isn’t the planned Make it Monday for today, I confess. But as what I was planning to use is still in 5 pieces on the floor that’s not happening right now. Plus, as so many people commented on this cake and how difficult it looked, I thought it a perfect distraction! Er…I mean, replacement…

YAY CAKE!
My mother’s birthday cake to be precise. She asked for rainbow, she got rainbow. She was thinking more lilac to purple, she told me afterwards, like on the cake tin box, but she SAID rainbow, so she got rainbow. I used 4 other cake tins which is why the bottom and the top are fatter and not quite the right size for the middle. If I’d not been doing this only hours before the party I’d perhaps pulled out all the tins and maybe realised the middle ones would be shallow. or if I wasn’t trying to get it done before the rest of the guests turned up, I could have made the other layers smaller, but that’s an idea for the future.

When asked what price this kind of cake could be sold for, the individual being questioned said that due to the level of work involved it would be expensive. Overhearing this conversation and being the person who’d done the work in the first place, I felt obliged to describe exactly how much work had gone into the cake.
No more than a normal cake.
Here’s how and why.

I was given this cake tin set as a present from my mother and I’d recently completed my collection of food colour pastes so I was pretty excited to use both! (be quiet, it’s totally exciting…)

I made two  basic vanilla cake mixes, the first I split between the two big and two little cake tins, in future, I may just make the one mix to split between these 4 to make them the same size. I then added the food colouring! It’s over a week later and I’ve still got some left under my nails, it comes off skin quite nicely in the shower, but apparently not from nails. Why was I so messy? They were sealed without a pull tab! Each new way I came up with to open them just made it worse! Anyway, I put the respective colours into the tins and whisked it in with a tiny plastic whisk to mix it thoroughly. I bunged them in the oven and made a second batch of cake mix. I split that between the 5 tins (and two cupcake cases) and repeated the process of adding the colour to the tin and whisking it in. I added FAR too much colour and made it a darker orange, which is unfortunately why the cake goes red, orange, red, yellow etc. Luckily these pastes have little to no flavour to them and you can get really intense colours with no downside so that was a relief. Once they were all done I mixed up a batch of buttercream and started sticking them together with a thin layer.

When I completed a size I still did that entire layer with buttercream, to make it easier later as I intended to hide the pretty with plain white. (Unfortunately half the people had seen the cake naked already but eh.) I had no prop-y type things so I stuck a metal skewer down the centre of the cake to stop the upper layers sliding off or tipping over, this worked really well and I’ll probably just do that again next time! I had to mix us a second batch of butter cream at this point so I’d have enough to to the sides, I only JUST made enough and I’d certainly make more next time, just to be on the safe side (I made it to a ratio of 100g butter 140g icing sugar, but I doubled and halved all over the show I can’t actually tell you how much I used in the end.)

See? Easy! AND fast! (Though if I’d had 7 bowls, I’d maybe have tried splitting and mixing in the bowls, that would have taken forever and left sooo much washing up so I’m definitely going to try this way again!)