Rainbow Cake and Mother’s Day

I had been toying with the idea of making a rainbow cake for quite a few months and was giving it serious consideration for Mother’s Day when my sister provided the final ‘will-definitely-give-it-a-go’ last week in the form of a pretty photo of a rainbow-painted house on her blog. To make it, I multiplied my vanilla cupcake recipe by two and a half, reducing the overall quantity of flour slightly, and then divided the mixture into seven bowls to colour the seven different colours of the rainbow. The first colour I did was red and it seemed to go okay – not brilliantly, but okay. Things went a little awry after the second colour, which looked like it might end up a browny colour unknown to any rainbow. I decided to bake the first two coloured batches anyway and then re-divide the remaining (as yet uncoloured) mixture into seven and try colouring it again. The second attempt at colouring went much better than the first and the first attempt turned out not to be as awful as I thought, so I ended up with nine layers of coloured cake. The first attempt at red actually looked a bit better than the second so I decided to sandwich the two together with a very thin layer of icing. The layer that I thought would turn into a browny colour actually turned into a variant of blue (though still one unknown to any rainbow) and I was debating whether to include it or not when J walked into the kitchen, saw the height of my stack of cakes, and encouraged me to put every layer into the cake and make it as high as possible. I duly did so and ended up with a leaning (though only slightly) tower of cake which I covered well with vanilla icing to hide the rainbow layers.

My poor Mum knew that the cake contained a surprise, and expected it to be something unpleasant, so was very happy when this is what her surprise turned out to be:

Happy Mother’s Day, Mum. You are the best. Without your patience with our ‘experiments’ and encouragement to cook and bake when we were growing up, I would never have had the courage and confidence to try new things in the kitchen or to make up my own recipes (which all the recipes on this blog are, except where otherwise stated).