Rainbow Cake baking

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 are the yellow and green cakes.

 And here's the blue and purple ones.

 I've actually never talked about leveling cakes, so let's correct that. I always level cakes I'm going to decorate. At first, I thought it was wasteful, but it just looks soooooooo much better, that I always do it now. I know, I baked these layers in layer pans, which are very shallow, but I still level them. These cakes are not flat. Plus look again at the pictures of the ugly colors above if you need a reminder that they don't look that great yet.

How do I level a cake? I allow it to cool, take it out of the pan, put it on a turntable and placing a serrated knife at the lowest point of the layer parallel to the floor, I slowly turn the turntable, gently sawing back and forth making sure to keep the knife flat. I actually own a cake leveler, but I rarely use it because in my experience the wire has trouble cutting through the carmelization. That, and I can't actually use it on my turntable. It's too wide.

But check out the colors after leveling!

I prefer decorating with frozen cakes, but anyone who has ever tried to level a frozen cake can tell you: mission impossible. So I level the layers and then wrap them in foil and freeze them. The parties aren't this week.

But let's just get it out there. One of the parties is my baby's first birthday. And we'll be using the colorful cupcakes for her day care group. They get put in the freezer, too. Efficiency!