Easy Rainbow Layer Cake

You might notice my blog has changed a bit! I have spent all day working with my digital scrapbook bits and peices and putting together my new background and everything so here it is finally, I hope you like it! It still has some tweaking to go yet but I will hopefully have it all done during the week.

Now...to the recipe!

I'm certainly not going to claim this is my recipe because it's not, but for those of us who dont want a fandangled recipe where you need palette knives, egg whites at room temperature and mix masters then this is for you! It's basically a case of throwing everything together...the real effort comes from waiting for each layer to cook, then having the patience to let it cool and repeating the process over another 5 times :o) It's a FANTASTIC cake to make while you're doing other things though! If you're really lucky you'll have a larger oven and more than one cake tin! I made mine between doing loads of washing and tidying my craft room. And I have to say that all that work is most DEFINATELY worth it!! The finished cake stands just under 4 inches high, so it's not too big or too small and perfect for sharing!

The actual cake recipe comes from here at Best Recipes.com for Plain Cake and all I did was double the quantities of everything so I would have enough batter to make a 4 inch high layer cake.

Divide your batter as evenly as you can in 6 bowls and add your food colouring being sure to mix the colour in thoroughly. As for how much to use, it depends on how bright you want your cake, just work with a little at a time to get it right. Don't go too pale though as your colours will fade a bit in the oven. I went with yellow, orange, red, purple, blue and green for mine.

Then using a lightly greased 9 inch standard cake tin (I only have one so this, and I will be honest, a very slow process) add your first colour and bake at 180 degrees for 15 minutes (my oven is electric, you might need to adjust the cooking time for a gas oven). It's only a thin layer so you may need to spread out your batter with a spoon before baking.

Allow to cool, re grease your pan and pour in the next colour, bake for 15 minutes and repeat with the remaining colours. Once they're all cooked, you can stack the cakes up! I used a bit of icing sugar mixed in water to 'glue' the layers together but you can use the same frosting as the outside of the cake (getting to that bit!) in between if you prefer. Some recipes say to not stick them together and to just use skewers to hold the cake up then take them out when ready to serve but this cake won't stand very tall so unless you want to make a super cake you wont have to worry about that.

Also, other recipes may say that you need to cut the tops of each layer so that it sits perfectly flat but I didnt worry too much about that.

As for the frosting... I just used this recipe from Taste.com for Easy Butter Icing Recipe and doubled it so I'd have enough icing for the cake but found I had too much left over so I would probably only make a third more than the recipe says so you're not wasting it :o) And how un-Martha am I? I just used a kitchen knife to frost my cake AND I didnt even give it a crumb coat! The icing covered up the colours underneath just fine too in case you're wondering!  If you would like to crumb coat it though, frost it all over thinly and allow it set, then frost again over the top of that. This gives a thick coat to your cake, I personally don't like it but it's all up to you!

That's it! That's all it takes! It's pretty simple and looks AND tastes amazing... I thought about writing this post for the cake yesterday when I made it but figured there are plenty of recipes for this online and didnt want to feel like mine was a bit average but what the heck! Enjoy! This recipe is for two of my readers (oh gosh I never thought I'd say that!) so I hope it all makes sense guys! Any questions just ask, I don't bite :o)