Rainbow Cake

What do I do to spice up a vanilla cake with vanilla frosting?  I make it a rainbow cake, of course.

One of my teacher friends called me last month to ask me to make a cake for her 8th grade students.  She was so proud of these children for passing their writing test that she wanted to celebrate their achievements with cake.  She asked me for a vanilla cake with vanilla frosting.  Sounds easy enough.  When I started to think about how much effort these students had to put into this test, it just didn't seem fitting to make a plain old vanilla cake.  An extraordinary accomplishment deserves an extraordinary cake.  I wanted to stick with the vanilla flavor but I added a little "flair" to the cake with lots of bright colors.  This was my first rainbow cake and I am just thrilled with how it turned out.

I started with a simple yellow cake recipe and tinted my frosting with different colors.

Yellow Cake
Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Beat in eggs, one at a time.

Add dry ingredients in 3 batches, alternating with milk.

Divide batter among smaller bowls.












Color each bowl of batter a different color.

Drop spoonfuls of batter into a greased cake pan.

 Bake 30 minutes at 350.

 Cool 10 minutes in pan and then invert onto a cooling rack.

After the cake was filled and frosted, I added some extra special touches.  I made a piece of notebook paper out of fondant to lay across the top of the cake and I made some pencils out of cadbury chocolate fingers to go around the outside of the cake. 

What a fun way to celebrate a great accomplishment.

Ciao!