My 3 1/2 year old nephew, James, & I had so much fun this afternoon making a recipe that I stumbled across online: Rainbow Cake! I saw this recipe on a fun website all about color & design, which I enjoy, called Color Lovers. Of course, I immediately thought about my little nephew who was about to visit & the fact that I thought he'd get a kick out of this! And did he ever!! We had a great time, took pictures, didn't make too much of a mess, & boy is the cake delicious! And so much fun to see! I sure love baking :)I wanted to share this recipe with you all. It was created by a woman who has her own blog (Omnomicon), which she uses to post her own original recipes! This Rainbow Cake recipe isn't in your regular format, and commentary is added in all along the way, but take it from me that it works! :)
Sunny Day Rainbow Cake:
2 boxes white cake mix
24 oz of clear diet soda (2 cans, ginger ale and sprite work well)
gel food colouring
16 oz whipped topping
2 oz instant fat-free sugar-free pudding mix (2 smallish boxes)
The Rainbowing:
Measure the total volume (by my estimate, 64 oz), then divide by 6 and measure into separate bowls. There are 8 oz in a cup, so 64/6 = 10 to 11 oz, or 1 cup + 2 tbsp.
Stir colour into each bowl with its own spoon. For the first colour into the pan, measure out 2/3 to 3/4 of your mix (in this case about 1 c) as close to the middle as you can. Drop in your first three colours, then work on the other pan with the last three colours. So if you’re doing rainbow order, the first pan should have red, then orange, then yellow, and now the purple, blue and green go into the second pan. As a recap, this is so both layers are roughly the same size.
Bake the cake as instructed on the box. Check it when the box says to, but usually it’ll need an extra 5 or 10 minutes because of the density of the soda method. Just keep baking, checking back every 5 minutes or so until a toothpick to the center comes out clean. Let cool completely before moving to a wire rack.
The Frosting:
Meanwhile, make your frosting. Just mix the pudding mix in with the whipped topping for a few minutes. Dye if you’re into that. Frost your fat-free cake with your fat-free whipped frosting. Eat.
Directions:
Pour2-12 oz cans of soda into thetwo boxes of cake mix. No eggs, no oil, no water, no sweat. It worked out to 1.5 cups per colour, measurementwise. So I divvied that up and used my gel colours. (The gel colours, while not as good as pigment dye, are much bolder than the very liquidy food colouring you probably grew up with.)
The first colour you drop into the pan, use about 2/3 of the mix for that colour. Otherwise, the top (last) colour will really dominate. I used a heaping1 cup of each colour.
Drop the colours, one by one, into the middle of the pan, in neat concentric-ish gobs. Remember the cake is going to be sliced in the side there, so mixing it around on top isn’t going to make your slices any more psychedelic (trust me, I did the three-dimensional thinking for you already).
When you’re three colours in, start doing the reverse with the other pan. Since I’m going in rainbow order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, I got from red to yellow in the first pan, then purple, blue, green in the second. This is so that your two pans are equal if your measurements aren’t exact (and they’re not likely to be).
Now finish up. Follow the box’s baking instructions and do your dishes.
Now for the frosting:2 boxes of fat free sugar free pudding mix, and16 oz (two of the 8 oz tubs pictured) of fat-free whipped topping. Or sugar-free. Or light. Or regular. They’re all pretty much the same. But that’s it. The frosting will be a little tough to spread, so treat it like a buttercream (I guess, I’ve never frosted a cake with buttercream). Putting gobs all over, then smoothing in worked well for me.
Mmmmm.
Pictures From Omnomicon:
