The cake is not a lie!

     My hands may look like I cleaned up after a sick unicorn, but I have completed the famed rainbow cake. This cake would have taken very little effort if not for the amount of dyes that I had to mix. My icing apparently did not come out as sweet as I would have liked, but I will still count this a success rather than failure since my whole point was to focus on coloring and icing instead of flavors.
     The only "specialized" equipment I used was a cake leveler and an icing spatula. If you do not know of the magic of cake levelers and you bake often, you should check them out. I had no idea how I would stack three rounded cake layers without them tipping over, and then there was the cake leveler. It's basically a garrote wire between two sticks. You place the sticks on the counter, make sure the wire is at the correct height, and drag the wire across the cake. It was quite easy and wonderfully helpful. The icing spatula was also a help, but was not new to me, so not as interesting to play with.
 

  

      Coloring the batter took a lot of dye. The red batter took 115 drops of red dye - over half the bottle. The green icing took almost 100 green drops. If anyone is interested in the exact ratios I can give them to you, but I didn't want to go into the boring details here. I used a plain white cake mix with applesauce instead of oil for the batter.

The cake layers themselves only took about 18 minutes to bake at 350 F since I used small four inch spring form pans (so that I would have several small cakes to ice instead of one large one.) I think the colors turned out wonderfully. I made my own butter cream frosting for the icing. It made the cake quite tall and the slices looked a bit odd, but there was no danger of it toppling thanks to the cake leveler!

 

     Here is the finished product! I reversed the color progression from the picture I found (I thought red made more sense on the bottom so that blue was next to violet.) I found that my original sprinkle method (throw them and hope they stick) did not work quite as well as applying them with a spoon. I simply filled the bowl of the spoon with sprinkles, and pulled it up the sides of the iced cake. There were very few empty spots left after using that method. In order to ice the cake I put it on a cake round with the turntable from my microwave underneath (it's cheap and it works!) That turned out to be unnecessary since the cake was so small, but it was still fun to get to spin the cake around instead of trying to maneuver my arm in such a way to keep the icing smooth.

     I took the finished product to gaming tonight, and here is a picture to give the scale of the cake. If you have ever played D&D, or any other table top game involving mini-figs you will have a better idea of just how tall the cake is. Also, I have put the original picture that inspired me next to it for a comparison. If you happen to want some there is another un-eaten cake currently.Hope you enjoyed this week's cake!