bedtime tales: Make Your Own Rainbow Cake

In celebration of my little one's birthday I made her a bright and colorful rainbow cake.

I'll share with you a trick or two I used on this cake, you know, just in case you decide you want one for your birthday too.

First, I had to teach her what a rainbow was. I wanted this thing to be appreciated after all.

Second, I made myself a cake tin. I know this is totally unconventional, but it worked exactly the way I wanted it too. First off, who wants to go by an expensive pre-shaped cake tin? There are only so many times you are going to make the same cake, it just doesn't make sense.

Second off, this is cheaper. (Sort of ties in with the first point.)

Third off, I know I could have made a nice big sheet cake and then cut the rainbow out, but then I would have a plethora of crumbs. I hate crumbs. This technique gives you nicely baked edges.

Fourth off, this is fun. I've made big dinosaur-shaped cakes this way. It opens a whole world of new cake shapes.

To make the tin I used plain old tin foil. I would suggest heavy foil if you have it, but mine was normal/medium. I do not suggest using cheap/thin foil. I shaped the foil in a nice big casserole dish, you can use a large rectangular cake pan if that is what you have on hand. I knew that I would have a lot of empty space in my dish so I placed small glass jars in there to fill them in. This encourages the tin foil to keep its shape.

I then shaped out the rainbow with clouds on the end. Don't stress too much, frosting covers up the details. You can see that my shape was too wide for the sheet of foil, so I added pieces on the bottom. I didn't tape them down or anything, just molded it out. As I've said, I've used this technique several times, and it always seems to work out. Cake batter isn't super runny like water, so as long as it isn't on your counter for an hour with the batter seeping through the crevices, it shouldn't be a problem.

I then sprayed the tin with non-stick spray and poured in the batter. Don't use all of the cake batter if this is not a large cake. I made six cupcakes with my left over batter.

Stick it straight in the oven, the edges will start to cook right away and they won't seep through.

Tada!

Once it's cooked you can pull it out of the oven and remove the glass jars. Let the entire cake cool off before you remove the foil. You can lift it right out of the dish, then peel off the foil.

Be very careful not to break the cake. Mine actually did break because I kept it covered all night before taking off the foil and it got too moist. But I wasn't too worried about it because it was covered in frosting anyways.

If you want you can place it upside down on the serving platter before peeling it off. That might help it from breaking.

Now the fun part. Buy a nice big bag of mms and separate the colors.

Realize that red food coloring must be expensive because there is a serious lack of red mms.

Realize that blue and orange food coloring must be easy to make.

Frost the cake with whatever kind of frosting you want. If I were to do this again I would have bought pre-made white frosting, then given it a nice light blue color. I made myself some cream cheese frosting because my husband loves it, but it turns out yellowy/off white, and I was afraid to color it.

Stripe the rainbow with those mms, then you can use either white frosting or large marshmallows (cut in half) for the clouds. I used marshmallows because as I said, my frosting wasn't white.

And last but not least, get carried away with photo-shop.