Rainbow cake

Thanks for the pic Jeanelle :)

It was a friend's birthday party on Saturday and I had offered to bake a cake. Said friend doesn't have a particular love for rainbows. Neither is he a strong supporter of gay pride. I really just used his birthday as an excuse to bake a rainbow cake, something I had badly wanted to do in a while.

Most of the rainbow cake recipes I found online had recommended using gel food colouring instead of liquid, as the colours supposedly turn out more vibrant. Unfortunately, I had no idea where to get gel food colouring and so stuck with good ole' Queens liquid food colouring.

However, I had read somewhere that the trick to maintaining a vibrant colour was to add vinegar, which I obeyed, and hoped for the best.

 

I'm not sure if the amount of food colouring I used constituted "a lot" - half a teaspoon each of food colouring and white vinegar for each layer. However, it had the desired effect and the colours never lost their vibrancy.

 

I had to do some alchemy to get purple and orange, but thanks to D's wonderful mathematical skills, that wasn't too hard.

Purple: three parts red, one part blue

Orange: one part red, two parts yellow

I used a simple white cake recipe for the batter and just separated them evenly by six before I added the food colouring. What I did wrong however, was to put them in the oven for the same time indicated in the recipe. With each individual colour being such thin layers, I could have left them in for about half the time and ended up with a cake that would have been more moist.

However, it wasn't a problem that sweet icing couldn't cure!