HOW TO MAKE A MARBLED RAINBOW CAKE not from a box


Yep, that's cake batter.  Despite it's resemblance to a kid's spin-art creation gone awry, it's a rainbow cake.  Wow.  Lots of color.

I'm not normally an advocate of such a blatant abuse of artificial food colorings, but every once in a while life calls for such an occasion.  This time it was for the album release party for the Man's band, Goodcat

I covered the cake with dark chocolate frosting and topped it with their CD cover art in buttercream, so it was a fun surprise to see the rainbow inside.  It was also going to be in a dark bar, so I wanted the colors to really pop.  And pop they did!

I was going to just wimp out and use one of the Cake Boss tie-dye mixes, but I heard a lot of negative reviews about how they tasted terrible, so I thought I'd just make my own.

The main complaint from a lot of people is that it takes so many bowls and spoons to make a rainbow cake.  My solution is a bit of an art-class experiment and could be a fun hands-on kid lesson in color mixing.  You're going to get four (or even up to six) colors and only use three bowls total.

makes: one sheet cake- double it for more
takes: about 1/2 hr. to prep and 30 minutes to bake
YOU WILL NEED:
A yellow cake recipe like this one from Smitten Kitchen.  Everything that she does is amazing!
Red, Blue, and Yellow paste food coloring
1 large liquid measuring cup or mixing bowl
2 smaller liquid measuring cups or bowls


Mix up your cake batter in the lager bowl and pour about 3/4 cup of it into each of the smaller bowls.  Mix 1/4 tsp. yellow food coloring into your large bowl of batter and mix well.  Add 1/8 tsp. blue to one of the smaller bowls and 1/8 tsp. red to the other.  Pour half of the yellow batter into a greased cake pan, pouring it out in "blobs" around the pan.  If you want to make orange, too, you can mix a little bit of red into the yellow to make it orange and drizzle half of the batter into the pan (although it will alter the color of green that you get).  Mix 1/8 tsp. blue food coloring into the remaining yellow batter to make green.  Add blobs and drizzles of each of the three colors to the pan.  If you want a fourth color- purple- then save half of each of the red and the blue and mix them together.  Add more red and blue for a deeper purple.  Once you've blobbed and drizzled all of the frosting, you can leave it as-is or swirl it slightly.  Slightly being key here- if you swirl it too much, you'll end up with brownish-purplish cake.

Bake it according to the recipe and, voila!  Rainbow cake that tastes good!

Ta-da!  The finished product!


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