My kids know that I like to make cakes. They also know that I take a lot of special orders. My daughter Lucy started a trend two years ago where she would google cake ideas and show me what she wanted. That's how I ended up learning to use fondant trying to make the "funky girl birthday cake" she had googled. It wasn't quite like the original, but it was a good try:
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| Fondant bows can be quite tricky when you've never used fondant before! |
This year, Sophie informed me that she wanted a rainbow cake. Her exact words were: "Mama, here's the cake I want. It has 6 different colored layers and I really like the petal frosting on the outside. If you don't know how to do it, there's a YouTube tutorial online I can show you."
Um...okay, Soph. Challenge accepted. It just so happens that even though I probably have about 50 cake pans, I only have 1 round one in the size I wanted to make those layers. That made for a really fun routine of dyeing 6 bowls of batter, throwing one into the oven, waiting 16 minutes, popping it on a cooling rack, and throwing in the next one. And repeat - a bunch of times. There's 96 minutes of my life that I'll never get back.
I dutifully watched Sophie's tutorial on the petal technique while I was waiting for cakes to cool. I leveled the layers, slapped on some frosting in between, and crumb-coated the whole thing. It was a monster.
Once everything had set in the fridge, I proceeded to make more of a mess by coloring six bowls of buttercream. (Remind me to encourage my kids to stick to a monochromatic theme from now on.)
The petal technique wasn't too terrible. I know I'll be able to tweak it if I ever do it again to make the rows straighter and watch for gaps. But, for a first time, it wasn't too bad. I was a little panicked after the first two rows that it looked pretty awful but, once the cake was covered, I liked it.
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| Wait, this isn't how you cut your cakes? (I was having a mini heart attack that Sensei's sword was going to knock the whole cake over...) |
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| I was pleased with how the frosting on the outside matched up with the layers on the inside - the crumb coating prevented me from being able to tell how it was lining up. |
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| Now, that's what I call a slice of cake! (I gave each kid two layers, because those slices were bigger than their heads.) |
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| The finished product |
It was a lot of work, and my kitchen was filled with messy bowls of rainbow colors, but Sophie LOVED her rainbow cake. (And it was a big hit with the 6 & 7 year old set!)
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