rainbow cake

It's a good thing that Cha's program is not quite school because we get away with bending the no birthday cakes/healthy snacks rules once in a while. Madame Sophie, Cha's teacher is always impressed by the goodies I bring her and the kids, mainly because she's not a baker, not necessarily because of my mad skills.

They were working on colors on Cha's birthday, and when came snack time, Mme Sophie had the kids guess what color the cake was going to be. Little did she know, pretty much every kid was right with their guess!

I've been admiring rainbow cakes from afar for a little while, with Whisk-Kid, Sweetapolita and  The Great Cake Company having made particularly sweet ones, and the last one being the inspiration behind the clever decorating job that was super to hide my less than spectacular icing skills.

I always thought that making one of these would just be so much work (and dishes) but decided to make it anyways. And after finding my new favorite white cake recipe that calls for dirtying just one bowl, the task didn't seem so daunting anymore.

I used 6 inch pans to make the six layers, and I found the amount of batter this recipe yields is just perfect. The layers were thin and baked evenly so I didn't have to trim them to get level layers. I used my kitchen scale to divide the batter evenly between the bowls, added food color, and baked the cakes in two batches, 16 minutes each batch. Let them cool, then stacked them with store bought frosting between the layers. I tried to keep the frosting at an absolute minimum as I didn't want angry moms to be calling me because I'm feeding their kids sugar...

I thought this cake was a good opportunity to practice my frosting skills since I knew I was going to cover it up with sprinkles anyways. I had a great time with the crumb coat. It smoothed out nice, with no gaps or sagging or anything.

But the actual frosting part after I let the crumb coat chill out in the fridge was trickier. Much better than my lemon blueberry cake, but still  not as good as I had hoped. I'm much better at removing frosting from the cake than laying it on. Oh well. I guess I'll have to keep finding ways to hide the icing job until I get better at it!

Then came the tricky part! Covering the side of the cake with sprinkles. I set up over the sink, with a bowl of sprinkles and took handfuls to press onto the cake that I was holding with one hand at an angle. It was pretty effective, but there were sprinkles everywhere! And it took way less sprinkles than I thought. Less than an bottle actually.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with this cake. I just wish I had gotten a picture of the inside. I'm sure it was gorgeous and super yummy! And thankfully, this was the last of Charlotte's three cakes for her forth birthday! Ooof!