Rainbow Cake!

Rebecca

Apr 30

The kids and I watch a lot of cake videos. And ever since Dooner saw this one, she had her heart set on a "rainbow shapes" cake for her birthday. Here's my scaled-down version:

The final product is petite, but it was a full effort. I bought the fancy circular cutter set, and the fancy geometric shapes cutter set. I bought fondant, then learned how to make marshmallow fondant so I could extend it. Dooner and I colored the fondant one day.

Then the baking started. In the space of a week, I was making Dooner's cake, an Easter cupcake-cake for church, and a big chocolate cake for Jared's Birthday. I batched all that cake and buttercream: 4x6" marble cakes, 3x6" + 3x8" + 3x9" chocolate cakes, 4.5 dozen cupcakes, some chocolate and some vanilla, and two batches each of chocolate and vanilla buttercream. (You can see why my diet has suffered.)

The Easter feast was a blast! Several people brought cakes; we basically had cake and meat for lunch that day. Next time I will not try to decorate the cupcake cake on the morning of the event, though! Too much pressure!

The cupcake cake took waaay more of the vanilla buttercream than I had thought. I was all about economizing here: the colored buttercream on the Easter design was saved from Stringbean's cake. I had a lot of that left, and not a lot of vanilla. So... I did a crazy. I mixed all the leftover colors and made grey, then I added a dollop of purple. Voila! Purple buttercream - my baby's favorite color - for the inside of her cake. And enough white buttercream for a crumb coat.

So much for the inside of the cake. We all know that for this cake, it was all about the outside!

On decorating day, we happened to have a few of the kids friends visiting. There were six kids in all, so they each picked a color and kneaded it inside its bag while they waited their turn. Then they rolled out their fondant, cut fifteen or so triangles, and their designated color of circle. These kids sure know how rainbows work!

To make the rainbow, you just stack the circles, cut out the middle with the smallest cutter, cut the whole thing in half, and glue the halves together with some homemade piping gel. My halves weren't perfect; next time I'll be more careful about halving it exactly!

From the front, anyway, it looks fine.

I had picked the size triangle that I thought would best fit around the cake's circumference. It worked out pretty great! If the kids hadn't been helping me, I probably could have gotten the triangles more on point (haha) but this isn't about that. It was so much more fun with them.

(It also would havce helped if I had not misplaced my new fondant smoother! Grak!)

A few sprinkles on top, and it was done. Buttercream decorating has fewer steps, but I definitely appreciate the sharp, clean look of fondant. It's a different skill set, though. Cake decorating has quite the learning curve. Which, if I'm honest, is why I love it. I just want to keep learning!