American Baker in Germany

You knew it was coming. My baby is turning one and it seemed most appropriate to make a rainbow cake.  I've already written about the baking process in a seperate blog, so this will be the creation process. First of all, I thought it would be helpful to see the process of making Swiss Meringue Buttercream.  First, you heat your egg whites and sugar in a double boiler in a metal bowl. You can also use glass, but skip the plastic. Heat it until the sugar is no longer grainy and the mixture is hot to the touch. Then take it off the heat.  By the way, it's helpful to prepare your butter beforehand by cutting it into about tablespoon sized chunks. The butter should also be room temperature.  After you remove your eggs and sugar from the heat, mix it for between 7 and 10 minutes until it basically turns into 7 minute frosting and is 100% room temperature. It should not be remotely warm anymore. And it should look something like this.  Then add your butt...

This month, I'm making two different rainbow cakes for two different children's birthdays. So I'm feeling like a pro in the whole making a rainbow cake department, so I thought I'd be efficient and just talk about baking the rainbow cake itself. I had help, as you can see. But even without help, the first step is to mix up a batch of vanilla cake. This cake took 3 recipes of my vanilla cake and I had enough batter left over for a dozen very colorful cupcakes.  I made these one batch at a time and split each batch in two and colored them two different colors of the rainbow. I started with red and orange.  Then yellow and green.  And finally blue and purple. For whatever reason, the Wilton food coloring makes a very dark purple.  My leftovers made exactly a dozen cupcakes.  Don't worry if your cakes don't look that great when they come out. The carmelization actually alters the color of your cake. It will be beautiful when we level it. These ar...