Rainbow Cake

My lovely friend Rachel asked me to bake a cake for her little girl's ( and my beautiful god-daughter ) birthday. Lucy was celebrating her first birthday so I was only delighted and honoured to be making her very first birthday cake..........shed a tear :)

I used a Victoria Sponge for the cake and white chocolate buttercream for the frosting. I am actually drooling while thinking of that frosting!

"How to make a Rainbow Cake?"

 

Ingredients

 

• 175g butter, room temp
• 175g caster sugar
• 3 eggs,beaten
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract (optional, but a must in my books)
• 175g self-raising flour, sifted
• food colourings

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease and line your tins. I used two 7" square tin as I was doing a block shape but this is perfect for an 8" round tin.
2. Beat your butter for a minute or two until soft. Add your sugar and cream the mixture until it is light and fluffy.
3. Add your vanilla extract, if using, to your eggs. Slowly add this to the mixture while continuing to beat or if your doing it by hand beat well after each addition. If you add the eggs too quickly, the mixture will curdle, making the cake much heavier. If it does curdle don't panic try adding a spoonful of flour to bring it back. It wont affect the taste as much as the texture. Split your mixture in two and gently fold in food colouring.
4. Fold in your sifted flour quickly and pour the mixture into your prepared tins.
5.  Bake in the oven for15-20mins until the cake is risen and spongy to touch.

I had a few different food colourings but adding a little less or more will change the colour of the sponge drastically. With the basic food colours you can pretty much make up whatever colour you want anyway, so I wouldn't be rushing out to the shops because you don't have a certain colour. To avoid colour disasters, just remember to mix up your colours in a small bowl or something before adding to cake mixture.


For the cake decoration, Rachel wanted an alphabet block. So as with all my cakes it started off with a sketch. This is not a necessary step but I always do it for my novelty cakes, just to give me some sort of guideline. More often than not the end up completely different, with little tweaks here and there.

Finally, I iced the cake with fondant. As I said with the little changes I ended up having the A,B,C and D around the sides and the LUCY 1 on top!

And on a quick little side note,

                           "Happy Birthday to my beautiful little god-lady, love you lots"


Shirley x