Rainbow cake... Or should I say cakes?

So, I got a request for a rainbow cake... The birthday girl wanted a cake with all the colors of the rainbow mixed up together. O-K Can do! Here is what I did...

What you will need:

Vegetable shortening + a lil bit of flour for the baking pans

3 cups all-purpose flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, room temperature

2 1/3 cups sugar

5 large egg whites, room temperature

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups milk, room temperature

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple gel food coloring

What you will do:

Make cake batter like normal So.... In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder and salt; set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together butter and sugar. Slowly add egg whites and mix until well combined. Add vanilla and mix until fully incorporated. Add flour mixture and milk in two alternating additions, beginning with the flour and ending with the milk. Mix until well combined. Then divide the batter into six bowls of even content... If you're like me (OCD and perfectionist) this is harder said than done!! My best guess is that each bowl has about 1 1/2cups of batter in it :)

Then you wanna take your gel paste colors... I use gel paste because you don't have to use as much as you would with like the liquid food colors you buy in the spice section of the grocery store but I'm sure that those would work in a pinch? I also recommend the Chef Mate colors over Wilton (ssshhh don't tell Wilton) I know I know I am usually a HUGE Wilton customer but Chef Mate colors I find to be more condensed so you use even less paste than you do with Wilton. The draw back is that Chef Mate doesn't have all of the colors that Wilton does so I have an array of different pastes :)

With each paste color your going to want to color your batter to the desired color. Remember use very little paste because a little goes a long way... AND you can always add more but you can't take away after it's been added :)

Once you have beautifully colored cake batter it's time to start the baking process :) Your going to grease and flour either an 8 or  9in baking pan and bake each color individually. I baked mine at 350 for about 15 min each or until a knife stuck in the middle comes out clean :)

Once baked then you want to cool and level off each layer and then stack in the desired order with a little bit of frosting in between each layer to hold them together. Now, I'm a fan of whipped icing so that's what I used on this cake.. It's super simple to make. Put 1 carton of heavy whipping cream and 3tbsp of powdered sugar in a mixing bowl and turn it on until the whipping cream turns into a thick, icing like consistency (also called stiff peaks). Then frost the outside and stick it in the fridge until it's ready to be consumed! And once cut you will have a lovely slice of rainbow on every plate :)

Now, if you remember the birthday girl had actually requested a cake with all the colors mixed up so I made her her very own cake. With this one I simply took 2 spoonfuls of batter out of each color before dumping them into 8in pans to be baked and I slowly added each color on top of each other starting with the red then adding the orange and so on and so fourth and that made a wonderful tie-dye looking cake that pleased the birthday girl :)

Happy rainbows!