Rainbow Layered Birthday Cake

my handsome boyfriend turned 21 on friday and I needed to make sure I made the perfect cake to celebrate. this was so much fun to make despite it being a tedious task. I've seen this cake all over the internet in a million variations: layers of light blues and purples and light greens alongside thin layers and thick layers and different coloured icing. the possibilities truly were endless. to save myself the struggle I stuck with five basic colours: yellow, orange, red, blue and green. 

I used icing food colouring paste to colour my batter. I find that liquid food colouring doesn't hold as long and as anything bakes the colour starts to fade. these were perfect. they were bright and vibrant in the bowls and they were equally as amazing once the cakes had been baked.

I used this recipe from martha stewart for my cake batter - it made a ton. super easy to whip up and tasted delicious - it was just a simple vanilla cake. once you have it all mixed you separate your batter into however many bowls you want (depends on the number of layers!) and mix in the food colouring. I only have two nine inch cake pans so I did three rounds in the oven at 12 minutes each.

I froze my cakes on thursday night until friday afternoon when I made the icing and finished building this rainbow masterpiece. freezing them made it easier in layering them together because then they didn't crumble. you're supposed to trim your layers so that they all sit evenly on top of each other but I didn't want to risk accidentally breaking them so I decided against it. it left me with a ton of icing to fill the gaps but I made it work.

we finally had the cake yesterday at andrew's house! this cake traveled all the way to toronto with us on saturday morning and made it there in one piece. I am so thankful because the entire time we were driving in the 30*c weather with broken air conditioning all I could think was, oh my gosh the icing is probably running off the cake and gathering in a puddle around the blue bottom!

but this is proof it made it there alive. admittedly it has a bit of a lean to it but it still tasted delicious. the icing was a canadian living recipe that I actually had to double in order to make enough (so yes, that is 10 cups of icing sugar!). the icing was overly sweet and with five layers of cake as well, the piece I had almost threw me into a sugar coma. 

this was a really fun recipe to make. no one really knew (including the birthday boy) what was behind the white icing so when the cake was cut I was so excited to see everyone's reactions. they were just what I had been hoping for! 

I would definitely make a layered cake again. this was just too much fun to pass up! now I can say I've officially jumped on the rainbow cake bandwagon. I guess all we can do is wait and see what I decide to try next!

until next time, happy making!