Wednesday 4 June 2014

Somewhere over the rainbow!

Red and yellow and pink and green.
Purple and orange and blue.
I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow!
Sing a rainbow, too.

Rainbows are the beautiful sight of a multi-coloured arc shaped reflection of light in the sky. In the form of cake, rainbows are also very delicious!

Last weekend, I made a rainbow "splatter" cake. I hadn't heard of this kind of cake before, and seeing the photo, I was looking forward to making it! It was to be rainbow on the inside, and rainbow on the outside. And I will admit that it was incredibly fun to decorate!

On the day I set aside to bake the various cake layers, my children were lucky enough to have some cake off-cuts for afternoon tea (which brought back fond memories of the times I actually gave them afternoon tea):


Basically, once I'd layered the cake (with buttercream between each layer), and the cake was covered in black fondant, the idea was to "splat" runny royal icing all over it.

I really liked the effect.

I had covered the cake board in glad wrap (knowing it would be a messy project), and then colour by colour, I "splattered" them all over the cake!


Soon enough, the cake was looking more like this:


When I felt there was enough colour splattered all over it, I removed the glad wrap and tidied up the kitchen bench (and cupboards, and floor, and changed my clothes, too). I then took some of the royal icing, added some more icing sugar to each of the colours to make them thicker, and wrote birthday wishes around the cake board:


The final touch was rainbow fondant hearts and stars, which I poked into the top of the cake - some on straight wire, some on curly wire (that I curled around a permanent marker just prior to attaching).


I added ribbon around the base of each tier (the colours chosen by the birthday girl), and then, the cake was done!


It felt like the longest day waiting until the birthday party started (a whole 4 hours wait!) to see what the cake looked like on the inside! But it was worth waiting! The colours were vibrant, and worked really well with the design the birthday girl had chosen :)


Of course, I take mental notes every time I make a cake. So here's the things I've learnt from making this kind of cake (i.e. the things I would do differently if I was to do it again):

1. Wait for the royal icing to dry/set (at least a little bit!) with each colour, otherwise they start blending as it all runs down the sides of the cake.

2. I'm pretty sure the way to avoid the pooling of the royal icing in between the two tiers would have been to make two separate cakes. I didn't do this so that each slice of cake could have all 6 colours without black in the middle, but it may have been easier to both cover, and decorate two separate cakes, and then stack them.

3. HAVE FUN! With this style of cake, there's no right or wrong way it should 'look' at the end. I certainly enjoyed creating this cake!

Happy birthday Myah!! :)

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