How to Make a Rainbow Cake

The first time you make a rainbow cake, it can be a bit intimidating or even a bit confusing. It's not difficult, but it can take some practice to gain confidence. So, let's go through the process.

The first thing you need is vanilla cake batter. Why specifically vanilla? Well, in my experience, vanilla cake is the lightest in color and therefore takes color the best. If you want to make another flavor, just make sure it's something that's not too dark in color or you will have trouble coloring your batter. This is actually a double batch of my vanilla cake, but I only used about one and a half recipes.

 I am using layer pans today simply because I find them more practical when making lots of different colored layers. This is absolutely not necessary. If you only have one pan, you can still make a rainbow cake. You just have to only bake one layer at a time.

I lined them with parchment paper and sprayed them with baking spray.

 Then I got out six different bowls. Each bowl contains six cupcake scoops of batter (using a Wilton cupcake scoop). That's about a cup and a half of batter. Then I colored them separately. Red is a good squirt of red food coloring, orange is a drop of red with a half a squirt of yellow, yellow is a good squirt of yellow food coloring, green is a squirt of lime green with a drop of blue, blue is a good squirt of blue food coloring and purple is a good squirt of purple and a couple drops of pink food coloring. I prefer using rainbow dust food coloring, but any kind should work as long as you can get the bright colors.

 My kids "helped" of course.

 I poured the batter into the layer pans and baked them two at a time. Since I had six colors and only four layer pans, the last two colors had to wait until the first two had cooled and we could use them again.

 When baked, it looks a little off color. That's perfectly normal. The browning on the outside of the cake alters the color slightly. It will still look gorgeous inside.

 You can see when you turn them out of the pans that the color is still there.

 You will end up with six layers of cake.

 Isn't that pretty?

 One thing I like to do, though, is level my layers. They're not that domed, so they don't strictly need it, but I like to take off the top layer of browning so you can see which layer is which color.

 When you stack them up, you can really see the color.

 Just stack them in rainbow order. Purple on the bottom, then blue, then green, then yellow, then orange and finally red. 

Watch us make it on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/O-BprU_RsWc
Schaut zu wie wir es auf YouTube machen hier: https://youtu.be/yg-fDpI6By8