Hello my lovelies! Who’s in the mood for some cake? Because this week I’ll be giving you my recipe for a big rainbow cake! And to make this cake even better (because who doesn’t like rainbow cake..) this recipe can be diary free should you need it to be!!
This cake is a simple vanilla sponge cake and can be adapted for any flavour of cake! I use this for all of my cakes and I’ve never had someone not like it. You can also make this into cupcakes – I’ll probably do a cupcake recipe soon too.
So, here’s what the cake looks like:
Looks pretty tasty doesn’t it!
Right, onto what you’re going to need, I’ve put together a shopping list you can download here!
For the cake:
- 9 oz Salted Butter (it can be spreadable or not, I used Vitalite as my mum is intolerant to buttermilk!)
- 9 oz Caster Sugar
- 9 oz Self-Raising Flour (make sure you save a little flour to thicken up your cake batter if you need it!)
- 6 Large Eggs
- 2 tsp Vanilla Extract
- Red, Orange, Green, Purple and Blue Food Gels (these can be found in sets or separately)
- Baking Paper
- Cake tins (2 minimum, I used 6, but it can be done with 2!)
- A cake stand or plate to put the cake on!
For the icing:
- Salted Butter (I eye-balled this and made more icing when needed)
- Icing sugar (I eye-balled this too, but would recommend getting 2 large bags of icing sugar, this icing is all personal preference!)
- Red, Orange, Yellow, Green and Blue Food Gels
- Mini Marshmallows
- White chocolate icing tubes – I got these from Tesco (pipe dairy free chocolate if you’re making this dairy free!)
- Any other decorations you want to use! (I used smarties)
So, onto making the cake! Here’s a quick clip of the process!
1 . Pre-heat the oven to 180°C for fan-assisted ovens or 200°C for other ovens.
2 . Lay out baking paper on the worktop and draw around the bottom of your cake tins and cut them out, I recommend cutting out the baking paper like this: 
After this I grease my baking tins and put the grease proof paper into the tins shiny side up. Then put the tins aside for a bit later.
3 . Measure out all of your ingredients. When making this cake I luckily had access to 6 cake tins, but if you’ve only got 2 tins don’t worry, to bake your cake in batches of two cake layers, use measurements of 3 oz per ingredient and repeat this another 2 times, which will give you 6 layers of cake.
4 . Add the butter and sugar into a big mixing bowl and cream them together.
5 . Then sift in the flour , pour in the eggs, add the vanilla extract and mix together. I usually start mixing with a wooden spoon and then move onto using an electric whisk. If the cake batter is too runny then you can add a little more flour. (I love how you can just chuck everything in the bowl with this recipe!).
6 . Once the batter is mixed, separate the batter into bowls into equal parts for however many tins you’re using.
7 . Then, add in the food colouring gels! I used quite a lot to make my cake extra bright, but it’s up to you how much you use!
8 . Pour your batter into your tins and smooth it around to make sure it’s evenly dispersed. (When you pour in the batter, it may seem like you’ve not got enough, but the cake will rise a little and you don’t want the layers too thick or the cake will topple over!).
9 . Bake the cakes for 13-15 minutes and check they’re cooked through with something small and sharp, I use toothpicks, if it has no batter on it, it’s cooked! Take out the cakes and place them on a cooling rack.
10 . Repeat stages 1-9 twice if you’re using 2 tins per time! When you’ve taken your yellow cake out of the tin, use a knife (or cookie cutter) to cut out a circle from the middle. Then slice the cake in half; this will leave you with two rainbow layers for the top of the cake! Then you can go ahead and snack on the circle of cake you just cut out haha.
11 . Whilst your cakes are baking and cooling, it’s time to make the butter cream! This one doesn’t have specific measurements as everyone has their own preference for how they like their buttercream to taste. I use quite a large amount of butter and icing sugar.
12 . I begin mixing the butter and icing sugar together with a fork so the icing sugar doesn’t create a huge icing sugar cloud, and once most of the icing sugar is mixed in I go in with an electric whisk to make the buttercream light and fluffy.
13 . Put about 4/5 of the buttercream into a piping bag (you can use a sandwich bag if you haven’t got one! Or you can get a box of disposable ones from Tesco). Then begin by putting a small amount of icing onto the cake stand/plate to stick your blue layer of cake onto the stand/plate.
14 . Then pipe layers of icing onto each cake layer, the colours should go (bottom to top): Blue, Purple, Green, Orange and finally Red. Then cover the top and sides of the cake in buttercream and smooth out as best as you can.
15 . To help smooth out the buttercream further I use baking paper, shiny side to the cake, and use your hand against the paper to smooth over the icing.
16 . After you’ve smoothed out the cake, ice the two rainbow shaped layers together, add icing to the top layers of the rainbow shape and put on top of the cake and smooth over with baking paper.
17 . Separate the left over buttercream into 5 bowls and add in the food colouring gels.
18 . Put the coloured icing into different piping bags or sandwich bags and pipe over the rainbow to give it some colour!
19 . The add on some white mini marshmallows onto the bottom of the rainbow so it looks like clouds.
20 . Then warm up the white chocolate icing tubes (follow the instructions on the tubes for preparing them) and squeeze drips over the edge of the cake and cover the top layer.
21 . Finally, decorate with any sweets you want and enjoy!
Here’s how it looks when it’s finished!
I hope you like how this cake looks and tastes!! If you decide to make this yourself then please tag me in any photos you put on instagram @theweightofmyworlds or on twitter @worldsweights, I’d love to see your cake creations!
Have a lovely week everyone, you’re the best! Love,
The Weight Of My Worlds 