I Cook~I Bake~I Live: Rainbow Cake

I decided since January that Kieran's 3rd birthday celebration will carry the theme of Rainbow! Yep..my happy cheery boy loves rainbow, so does Zachary. It is such a fun theme to work on and I have already done several bookmarked from Pinterest (don't you just love Pinterest for having everything and anything you need under the sun; party ideas, deco ideas, food ideas etc etc etc. the list is limitless)

Last year, I tried baking rainbow cupcakes and it was disaster. I attempted it again over the last weekend and I am glad I had the courage to bake it once more. The result was great.. it receives great reviews from both my boys and colleagues of myself and hb's. Happy happy.. instead of the usual cream cheese or whipped cream, I used my favorite peanut butter frosting but something went wrong (I tried a new recipe) and it was a tad too sweet to my liking. Ugh.. i really have no sweet tooth I must say.

Baking a rainbow cake will require a white cake as base.. I refuse to bake one from ready made box you buy off the shelf so I start to source for recipes; Nigella, Joy of Baking etc etc etc.. then I saw this lady, BakingTaiTai baked her rainbow cake..looks good! I shall try her butter cake recipe. Her recipe calls for high content of sugar. I reduced them drastically but still sweet to my liking. I will definitely use her recipe again. The cake was moist and soft, mainly due to the egg white and milk that was used.

Assembling the cake was a messy affair. Instead of the usual stacked rainbow cake, I ventured out to try checkered board rainbow cake. I googled on how to assemble it. Looks pretty easy. Obviously I underestimated the effort. The moment I cut out the shape, my cake broke. Some broke by few pieces. I was sad of course but luckily it will not be noticed.

Rainbow Cake (recipe adapted from BakingTaiTai)

- 150g unsalted butter
- 250g castor sugar (I reduced to 180g; I will reduce it further)
- 3 large egg whites
- 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 280g cake flour
- 2 1/2 baking powder
- 240ml fresh milk

Food coloring: Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Orange

How?
- Preheat oven to 180C and prepare 6 (I use 5) 6" round baking pan. I use disposables cake pan from Phoon Huat.
- In a clean bowl, beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. This will take about 5 minutes.
- Add in egg whites few additions at a time, making sure it is well incorporated.
- Mix in the vanilla extract next.
- Alternating between cake flour + baking powder and milk, mix them in 3 additions, starting with flour followed by milk.
- Continue beating the batter for additional 1 minute.
- Divide the cake batter into equal bowls (roughly 270g each) and mix it with food coloring. The trick is to mix a little food coloring at a time to make sure the color is not too intense. I am using Wilton gel coloring.
- Bake in oven for 15 minutes or until inserted skewer comes out clean.

Assembling the cake
- Once the cake is cooled, wrapped them in cling wrap and pop them into the fridge. This will help when cutting out the round shapes.
- In the mean time, prepare the frosting (you can use any frosting that you like).
- Starting with violet as the base, cut out the round shape using cookie cutter/cake ring. Do the same for blue, using the 2nd smallest round shape cutter.
- Frost the inner part of the cake, and place them nicely surrounding the violet cake. Repeat for the other colors.
- Crumb coat the cake (mine came up to almost 8" tall!) and let it set in the fridge. Cover the remaining of the cake with frosting and decorate as you wish.

Steps to assemble the cake