Hellobee

Last week I shared Miss H’s rainbow first birthday party! And while I officially planned the party for a couple of months, the idea and planning for the cake was rolling around in my head for much longer. It was something that I wanted to do myself and I wanted to do it well.

While I’m an enthusiastic baker (I even have a very old baking blog), I don’t think I’m particularly talented. I think that I am very good at following directions! And to make a layered rainbow cake, following directions is key. While I never found a blog post that covered everything I wanted for the cake: quantities for how much batter to make, quantities for how much buttercream, and decorating techniques, I managed to piece together everything through multiple blogs I found and through recipes I’ve used in the past.

I will apologize in advance for the lack of personal pictures! I was baking along and on a tight timeframe (and, umm, baking is messy!) so I wasn’t able to document the process.

Inspiration
Let’s start with my inspiration cake, found on the blog Bump Smitten:

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While there are many layered rainbow cake examples out there, I loved how vibrant the colors are while still being a little bit on the softer side. I fell in love with this cake! And while the instructions on the blog are helpful, they are very vague (make some batter, freeze and stack the layers, ice). So this cake served primarily as my inspiration.

Cake Recipe & Baking
A lot of the examples I found for this type of cake used cake mixes, which I generally don’t use (baking from scratch is so easy!). So I worried about how much cake batter to make. Should I double or triple a recipe? I was also planning on making a 6 layer cake (instead of the 8 layers in my inspiration photo). I ended up using a favorite of mine – Dorie Greenspan’s “Perfect Party Cake.”

Since it’s from her cookbook  I did not want to include the recipe in the post, but you can find it with a quick Google search or through purchasing the book. It’s a perfectly light and lemony white cake. The standard recipemakes a typical 2-layer 8″ or 9″ cake. I doubled the recipe for my rainbow cake and the quantity was perfect.

After making the cake batter, I divided it into 6 small bowls. Using my food coloring (I have this set of colors) I dyed my cake batter. I have four 8″ cake pans. I greased two, filled with batter, and baked. Once the first two layers were almost done baking, I repeated the process with the next two so that they could immediately go into the oven after I pulled the first two. When the first two were fairly cool, I flipped them onto cooling racks, washed the pans, and got the final two layers ready to bake.

Once all six layers were baked and cooled, I wrapped each layer in plastic wrap and placed in the refrigerator for 2 hours.

Buttercream Frosting
The weekend before the party, I made a huge batch of buttercream frosting. I honestly had no clue how much I would need, but I decided to make a lot. As it turned out, I used all of it! I’m being 100% honest when I say that I have no clue where this recipe came from. I have it saved in my email as a draft from 5 years ago. But it’s always my go-to buttercream. I doubled the recipe, so based on that it should have made about 7 pounds (!!) worth of buttercream. I kept it in a sealed container in the refrigerator until needed; before using the frosting, I put it in my mixer and beat it for 5 minutes to get the air out of it.

I’m posting the recipe because I think it’s very helpful, but unfortunately I’m not sure what the source is.

Buttercream Frosting
4 sticks butter, room temperature
4 cups Crisco shortening
2 teaspoon butter flavoring
2 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon almond extract
4  pounds powdered cane sugar
1 teaspoon salt
Water as necessary

In the mixer, mix butter, Crisco shortening, and salt together to incorporate, about 5 minutes on low. Add almond, butter and vanilla extracts. Mix together well. Add about 1 pound of powdered sugar and the meringue powder and mix. Add 1/2 cup of powdered sugar at a time and mix until you get the consistency you want. Add a little milk, a teaspoon at a time, if necessary to thin the frosting. Blend well on low for several minutes. Use immediately or cover and refrigerate.

Stacking & Icing
My downfall is always being able to stack and perfectly ice a cake. I’m bad at it. And then I came across some tutorials from a blog called Whisk Kid. The tutorials have incredibly helpful step-by-step photos.

I started off the the tutorial “How to Assemble a Layer Cake.” The only exception is that for the rainbow cake, you do not need to split your layers in half because you have very thin layers. Otherwise, I followed the tutorial exactly.

The final example in the tutorial of a perfectly stacked cake:

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And here is my stacked rainbow cake (far from a perfect photo, but you get the idea!):

After the cake is stacked, it’s time to do a crumb coat and then another “coat” of buttercream for a nice, smoothly iced cake. Don’t worry, Whisk Kid also has a great tutorial called “How To Frost a Cake.” I followed this tutorial exactly. And I wish had taken a picture of my final smoothly iced cake, because it was gorgeous, but I didn’t. Sadness. However, Whisk Kid has a fantastic final product:

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Decorating the Cake
Now, once you have your perfectly stacked and smoothly iced rainbow cake, you can leave it be. Or you can choose to do some additional decorating. I found a great tutorial for making a petal effect on the cake, so I decided to take the rest of my buttercream icing, dye it a pale purple and try my hand at making these petals.

The blog Oh Happy Day has a great tutorial on these “petals” or “scallops,” as they call them.

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While it was a lot of work, it was a very simple process and fairly difficult to mess up! Here’s my final decorating job:

Smash Cake
For Miss H I decided to make a healthier smash cake. I found this recipe for a cake that included fruit and veggie purees. I baked it in three 4″ round pans and decorated it with the buttercream using the same buttercream recipe used for the large cake (I had run out of buttercream so I made a smaller batch for the smash cake). I tinted it a pale aqua and used the same petal decorating technique.

Here the cakes are side by side:

While that may seem like a lot of information to throw at you, I honestly feel like these tutorials will ensure you are able to execute a perfect rainbow layered cake (or, a perfectly decorated layered cake of any color or number of layers!). On my “big baking day” I had the browser on my iPad set with all of these tutorials so that I could go through them one by one as I was in the midst of decorating. And while I’m usually trying to even out a sagging cake or doctor things up with extra icing, I never felt like I had any cake emergencies! Just a whole lot of gorgeous, delicious cake.

Happy baking!