Rainbow Week

I'm having another great week of baking as most of my orders are calling for the Rainbow cake, one of my most favourite cakes to make (and eat).

My friend had organised a farewell school party for her daughter who is graduating from kindergarten. It's a great gesture as these children who have been fellow playmates for years will now say goodbye as they embark on Primary 1 next year. 

The cake to mark the occasion is a pastel coloured rainbow cake, with happy cloud decorations. It's a wonderful choice as the rainbow cake never fails to bring on cheers and smiles ; ) And it also symbolises good things to come!

This is the first time I'm adjusting the colour intensity to try and achieve a pastel-coloured rainbow. Usually, I would use enough Wilton food colour to produce an intense hue for each layer. By doing so, it also helps overcome the fact that the cake batter is originally yellow, so you'd need to add quite a bit of blue colouring anyway to make sure that the batter is really blue and not green (blue + yellow). So in the case of a pastel rainbow, a bit more colour mixology is required. For the blue, I used cornflower blue plus a drop of turquoise to make it a muted blue, even the violet requires a bit of tweaking. The result was not bad, but upon some reading up, I could have made a super white cake batter by leaving the egg yolks out. The only thing I don't like about that is, what am I to do with 12 egg yolks? 

So anyway, I stacked the layers starting with the lavender (violet), then blue, green, yellow and pink. It's all held together with cream cheese frosting and then crumb coated with a layer of buttercream for where the fondant meets the cake. 

Frosted cake layers

I like how it looks like a snow white cylinder. After this, I applied a layer of white fondant. While it's a regular 9" round cake, the height stacked up to about 5.5cm, this means a sheet of fondant about 20cm wide is required. I always have trouble rolling a large piece of fondant, which means I'll always have problems with the edges when covering the cake.

Sweetheart Coulds 

Here's the completed cake. One thing about rough edges is knowing how to cover it. In this case, I plastered pink fondant hearts in different sizes for the border and added marshmallows for the cloud effect, though I wished the marshmallows were round instead.

Soft colours make a sweet cake

For the Class of 2012... good luck kids!

I'm definitely more confident now with sculpting pieces especially since I've learnt to use gum paste. For the rainbow featured here, I made it with gum paste as it would dry hard enough to stand on the cake. I can't wait to try other 'upright' designs soon.

Somewhere over the rainbow...

And there were cupcakes too!

Rainbow revealed

I was told the kids went "Wah" when the cake was cut into... and I can imagine the smiles on their faces too.