It was Lucy’s birthday last week and so I decided to test out my baking skills and create a pastel rainbow cake. Not something I had tried before but ended up turning out pretty great - even if I do say so myself. It takes a bit of time - from start to finish it took me nearly three hours - but the end result is pretty impressive.

I N G R E D I E N T S :

200g Self-raising flour

200g Caster Sugar

200g Butter (at room temperature)

4 Eggs

1tsp Vanilla Extract

1tsp Baking powder

Food colouring of your choice (I used five different colours)

For the filling:

200g Butter

400g Icing sugar

1tsp Vanilla Extract (optional)

1tbsp Cream

Jam (optional)

M E T H O D :

1. Preheat your oven to 180ºC and grease your cake tins. It’s okay if you don’t have enough cake tins for the amount of layers you want your cake to have as you can bake the layers in batches.

2. Cream together the sugar and butter until light in colour (the lighter the colour the fluffier your cake will be, an electric mixer makes this much easier).

3. Add the vanilla extract and baking powder.

4. Add the eggs one at time with a tablespoon of flour to prevent the mixture from splitting. 

5. Fold in the rest of the flour with a metal spoon to add extra air to the mixture.

6. Divide the mixture into separate bowls for each colour, I divided mine into five bowls as I was using five different colours but the same principal applies whether you’re using more or less colours than I did. 

7. Add the food colouring to the bowls of plain mixture. Add a little at time so the colour doesn’t become overly vibrant as we are wanting a pastel look but add slightly more when you think the colour is perfect as the colour will fade slightly as it bakes.

8. Transfer the mixture to the cake tins and spread evenly before putting in the oven to bake. Cooking time will depend on the amount of layers you are baking. For my layers, as they were fairly thin, only took roughly 7 minutes. 

9. Take the cakes out of the oven and leave to cool in the tins for a few minutes before transferring them onto a cooling rack to completely cool. 

10. Whilst the cake layers are cooling make the butter icing. Mix together the butter, icing sugar, cream and vanilla extract until light and fluffy. The longer you mix the butter cream the lighter in colour it will become, personally I like a fairly white looking butter cream - although its very hard to get butter cream purely white because butter is naturally yellow tones - so I left mine to mix for a good 15 minutes.

11. Once the cake layers have cooled now is time to begin layering the cake. I chose to alternate between raspberry jam and buttercream between my layers so the cake wouldn’t be taken over by buttercream but this optional. I also put buttercream all the way around my cake to give it a neat look and also so the rainbow aspect of the cake is more of a surprise. 

12. Decorate as you please, I used Smarties and pink glitter sugar. You could also cover the cake in fondant icing over top of the buttercream if you wanted to. Chill in the fridge for a while to allow the buttercream to set if the buttercream is very soft or its a hot day.