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Inspired by the Nazi-cake-fueled antics of this thread in GBS (and specifically this image contained therein) I became curious as to how easy it would be to replicate such a colorful and tasty interior. I also became hungry for cake. The solution? Attempt to create my own rainbow cake and document the results!  Of course I have baked cakes before, but never have I tried to create a multi-colored product. The cake in the image I was trying to duplicate has an impressive swirled pattern which seems to run laterally through the cake instead of vertically. I really had no idea how to create such a pattern, so I opted to go the simple route and layer food-color-dyed globs of batter on top of each other and see how it went. My main concern was whether the colors would run together very much, or if the batter would keep them separated and create distinct bands of color. Well, there's only one way to find out! To start off, the ingredients:  I used the basic recipe on the back of the batter mix box. The only thing I changed was adding a little bit of vanilla extract, because I add vanilla to pretty much every dessert I make. The utensils:  Your standard cake-making fare. I lacked multiple mixing bowls of equal sizes, so substituted Fiestaware bowl/cups. (I actually used a smaller pan than this in order to maximize cake density, and hopefully highlight the color striation.) The first step is obviously to mix the ingredients and blend them up:   Then I seperated the batter into equal parts, added food coloring, and mixed:    I used about 20 drops of dye per cup, but I probably could have gotten way with 15 or less. I wanted to make sure I got good color. The batter was very thick, and I had few worries of the colors running together during baking. Here is the batter all added together. My methodology was pretty primitive; I just scooped out portions of batter into the pan, trying to keep the colors seperated and varied.  Next, I put the cake in the oven. 40 minutes at 350 degrees did the trick. I made myself a Bloody Caesar while I waited.  Presto! The cake came out pretty well. There is some swirling at the top because I tried to even out the surface.  One sloppy icing job, coming right up:  It was time for the moment of truth; to cut her open and see how the interior turned out:   Well, that's about it. My cake is much more shallow than the "target" cake I was replicating, and mine has no swirling. I did learn some useful lessons from this though. The batter was thick enough that there was no color blending. This gives me hope that next time, I can use a spoon or something to manually create some twirls or patterns. I think I'll attempt to make individual parallel layers, and then swirl them together. Does anyone else have any tips/tricks/opinions on how to create a great-looking, multi-color cake?
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| # ? Apr 26, 2008 09:39 |
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| # ? Feb 09, 2010 17:12 |
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It was a solid effort though. If I had an oven I'd try to follow in your footsteps.
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| # ? Apr 26, 2008 13:18 |
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That's pretty cool! It reminds me of the rainbow bread I used to pick up at the grocery store. It's pretty much exactly the same colours. Did it taste good?
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| # ? Apr 26, 2008 19:40 |
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Way back a long time ago when I turned sixteen, I requested that my mother make a tie-dyed cake for my birthday party. She took pretty much the exact approach you propose--she just poured the different colored batters carefully in the cake pans and used a butter knife to carefully swirl the colors into each other. It came out beautifully and everyone who partook experienced a technicolor bowel movement the next day  Incidentally, the same approach is used to make the more traditional chocolate/vanilla marble cake.
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| # ? Apr 26, 2008 19:47 |
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That looks absolutely delicious. I'm really jealous! If you really wanted to separate the colours a little bit more, what I would try is cooking all of the different colours for about 7 minutes in separate pans, until they're not cooked but sort of on the way there, and then adding them together to make one cake. That way the initial mixing of colours as things start to expand wouldn't be as bad.
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| # ? Apr 26, 2008 22:51 |
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From looking at the target cake, it looks like they piped in different colored batter in a circular pattern than then maybe injected more colors to make the swirls into the cake pan? Worth a shot anyway.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 00:50 |
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Croatoan posted:From looking at the target cake, it looks like they piped in different colored batter in a circular pattern than then maybe injected more colors to make the swirls into the cake pan? Worth a shot anyway. I don't think half-baking the batter would work, though. I'm not sure how it would react to being half-cooked and then added together. Besides, it seems that if you don't stir the colors together too much before baking, they don't mix enough to ruin the separation. And of course, the cake is delicious!
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 08:54 |
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Food coloring needs to be loving outlawed.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 11:28 |
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If you don't mind, my husband and I made a rainbow cake today. We did it by mixing up the batter and then putting it in plastic sandwich bags. We added the food coloring and kneaded the bags for a while to mix in the coloring. Then we cut off corners of the bags and put it in the pans. It worked best by just doing it in swirls/layers one color at a time. It turned out okay. Not as good as the one from the nazi cake thread. It was tasty though! Pictures:     And because we were having so much fun with food coloring: here's some green hummus. Which we later realized looks like very creamy guacamole. 
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| # ? Apr 27, 2008 22:03 |
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Found the original rainbow cake on the 'craftgrrl' community on livejournal. All she did differently than people here have been doing is to spatter the batter in in rougly 'rainbow order'- red, then yellow, then green, then blue...etc. Nice work, lovely cake. Passover over and me without the people to eat a whole cake. Sigh.
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| # ? Apr 28, 2008 16:45 |
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Do you think it would work to make circle dividers out of parchment paper or foil in concentric circles, and pour colored batter into each circle? Maybe I'll try making a neapolitan cake or white chocolate-mocha-chocolate cake...?
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| # ? Apr 29, 2008 01:19 |
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Awesome cake, supercheesy. You got some pretty good color distribution there. I like jomiel's idea too. The food coloring cake ideas are endless! If you used something like foil, though, I think you'd have to leave the foil in. If you tried to take it out it'd probably pull the batter up with it (which might create some interesting effects on its own actually.) I wonder how foil in a cake would affect baking. Maybe I'll make some small cakes or cupcakes or something to try out different theories. I'll have to use 6 or 7 colors next time, so I can get a truer "rainbow" effect.
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| # ? Apr 29, 2008 02:38 |
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More rainbow cake experimentation! What's this? A rather unassuming, cream cheese frosted cake:  But cut it open and... Behold! Rainbow-ey deliciousness!    My initial approach for this cake involved parchment paper. I planned on constructing concentric rings of paper to contain each layer of color, and bake it (paper and all) to end up with perfect rings of colored cake. However, this proved to be impossible, or at least more trouble than it was worth. After cutting, folding and taping the very first (central) ring, it became obvious that the parchment paper was too flimsy to contain the very weight of the cake batter. As soon as I put any batter into the ring, it would collapse and leak into the rest of the pan. It might be possible if you built all the rings at once, and filled each one simultaneously to equalize the pressure, but that'd be too much work. So I ended up pouring each color consecutively into the center of the pan. I started with red, then added orange, yellow, green, etc. I consolidated indigo and violet so that there are only six colors. Ironically, instead of red being the "core" color in the middle, which I added first, it seems that each layer of color compressed and thinned the previous layers, creating the opposite effect. Nevertheless, the overall pattern of concentric color rings is almost exactly what I was going for, despite using a vastly different method. I'd rate this experiment a tasty success. The only thing I would do different is to be more careful with the amounts of colored batter used so that the color bands are more regular ("indigo," which I added last, is by far the dominant color, and you can barely see red.) After making these cakes, I don't think I'll ever make a "normal" cake again. The joy of cutting open these cakes for the first time, like a geologist discovering the layers of the Earth, is pure culinary fun.
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| # ? May 02, 2008 04:58 |
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That's amazing, Anony Mouse. You clearly put a lot of thought into that and the result looks awesome!
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| # ? May 02, 2008 09:38 |
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That cake is awesome! Next time we make rainbow cake we will have to try your approach! It does look like a rainbow model of earth. Haha.
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| # ? May 02, 2008 12:32 |
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I'm going to make one of these tonight, thanks. I think for the icing I'm going to use some pistachio pudding mixed in whipped cream.
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| # ? May 02, 2008 19:25 |
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This might be a worthless suggestion as the cake already looks great but I wonder if spraying a thin layer of nonstick spray would help keep the layers slightly more separate. Also, when you were pouring the batter was there anything else to the procedure aside than just pouring in the middle? I'd almost want a see a video of the recipe just so I could get a better idea.
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| # ? May 03, 2008 12:56 |
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I made this cake the day the thread was put up. I happened to be running off to bake a cake for a class project (mostly to show off and get elected as Vice President..) and found this thread. So I tried it. Decided a different approach: (AKA, I forgot how you guys did it.)  Lunch...  They turned out interesting:   Quick fondant work!  Unfinished, but finished enough.  Sadly, no inside pictures! I decided to give this cake to my dad to bring up to my late grandmother's sister's funeral. They were impressed by it, though I didn't think they would appreciated it as much as the younger folks would. But alas, there's my attempt! Flantastic fucked around with this message at Jun 03, 2008 around 07:32 |
| # ? May 06, 2008 05:02 |
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Flantastic posted:I made this cake the day the thread was put up. I happened to be running off to bake a cake for a class project (mostly to show off and get elected as Vice President..) and found this thread. So I tried it. That's beautiful! An all around lovely creation. I am absolutely baking myself a rainbow cake for my birthday. I actually really like this approach to it, seems a little simpler than the others but still really cool looking. Could you elaborate a bit on your technique-- did you just gently stir in the second colors?
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| # ? May 06, 2008 18:47 |
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I have to say that I personally like the whole "rainbow order" thing a lot better than the random tie-dye approach. They all look fun and unexpected, but it wasn't until I saw Anony Mouse's that I actually thought they looked edibly appealing. I wish I had an occasion to bake one of these.. maybe I'll make a "no occasion" rainbow cake! Thanks for ideas and tips!
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| # ? May 06, 2008 20:36 |
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I don't bake often but this thread plus the recent wedding episode of Top Chef made me realize that I wanted to make a cake, plus I realized that I had never tried my hand at making/working with fondant, so I thought I'd kill a few birds with one stone. This was the end result:  The fondant wasn't as hard to make as I had imagined, but it was a bitch to work with. Mine might have been a bit dry because it had a tendency to tear, but not having worked with it before I'm not sure what I should have expected. The cake was just a normal cake (lots of eggs, vanilla and cake flour), and I separated it into batches to color. I tried to compensate for the diminishing ring size by adding about twice as much red batter as the other colors, but it still is almost not visible. The cake rose pretty dramatically, which is why I think the colors got wavy. In between the layers I made a white chocolate buttercream, which I also used to affix the fondant to the cake.
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| # ? May 13, 2008 08:47 |
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My mom used to make rainbow cakes for me, except she did each color in a different layer. We would always try to remember what order they were "supposed" to go in, haha.
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| # ? May 13, 2008 19:11 |
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Anony Mouse posted:More rainbow cake experimentation! I used one box of Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe lemon cake mix.  The cake mix made about 6 cups, so I divided them into six bowls. The cake was already yellow, so I didn't use dye on the "yellow" cup. I used gel food coloring for the others.  In goes the "indigo" batter!  Then I poured the blue directly into the center of the pan.  And so on:   Baking the cake (according to box directions). Please, please excuse my disgusting oven; it doesn't self-clean, but I promise I will scrub it soon.  One rainbow lemon cake with lemon icing and raspberry jam filling:   Next time, I think I'll make the cake from scratch, but I was very pleased with how it turned out. Thanks, GWS! Edit: screwed up the photo size. Bean Trap fucked around with this message at May 31, 2008 around 02:05 |
| # ? May 31, 2008 01:54 |
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Bean Trap posted:I went with this method, only I put the indigo in first, so the red is in the center. I also used a lemon cake mix. Good drat job, my oven looks like hell. I'm impressed.
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| # ? May 31, 2008 01:59 |
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I did it again! It's just too good.  And you know. It's so easy, and it's so fun to showoff. Maybe.. maybe I'll flavor each layer? If you make a basic recipe and omit the vanilla.. and then add in your flavors to each separate color. Would this work? Or taste terrible? Like green mint.. red.. vanilla.. Yellow, lemon. Blue. um. Blueberry? Edit for self-esteem: I made this cake for a last minute pot luck we decided to have in the art room. It was late. The buttercream wasn't cooperating, and I ran out of pastry bags. I had to pull a cheap trick and douse the cake in sprinkles. I felt like I failed myself. =\ Flantastic fucked around with this message at Jun 03, 2008 around 07:30 |
| # ? May 31, 2008 07:44 |
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Flantastic posted:Like green mint.. red.. vanilla.. Yellow, lemon. Blue. um. Blueberry? That looks like a wonderful treat. Also the idea of red as a flavor made me giggle a little. But now I see you probably meant red for vanilla. I don't know that I'd want lemon, mint, vanilla and blueberry all in one dish... Maybe do most of them as one flavor, and have one color be different for a mild addition.
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| # ? May 31, 2008 07:48 |
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My sister made 'ranbow sherbet' cupcakes recently (here), with flavoured orange, yellow and green layers (orange, lemon, lime) and raspberry icing. It worked out really well - so it is possible, you just have to pick flavours that go well together.
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| # ? May 31, 2008 10:14 |
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I made rainbow cupcakes the other day. The recipe I was using came out with really thick batter for some reason, so the colors stayed in their layers really well. This is a lousy picture, but they were pink/purple/green with blue cream cheese icing. Delicious! I thought they would be a big hit with the little kids who were visiting, but they just licked off the frosting and ignored the colors. Oh well.
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| # ? May 31, 2008 20:11 |
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Woohoo! I am about as amateur as cooking/baking gets, but I've been trying more since my daughter was born. I didn't think I could make one of these--at least, not a good one, but lo and behold:  Ignore the fact that I'm cutting a cake with a steak knife, please. I don't know how some of you got the perfect separations between the colours, but I just used five Ziploc bags for mine. It was a huge mess, and I ended up with a lot of wasted batter, but it's so pretty.  I don't even want to eat the rest of it.
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| # ? Jun 02, 2008 20:44 |
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Chachu, those colors are great. I tried rainbow cake in sugar junior cones liken Longpig and was very disappointed. The cone took away from the cupcake taste. It got very.. stale.. and unappetizing. Were they bad cones, or does this actually happen? I frosted them with chocolate butter cream frosting. That was disastrous, considering I miscalculated on the coca. I gave up and made some regular cup cakes which seemed to be more popular with the family. To derail: Sometimes my butter cream frosting doesn't stick to the cake. Is there too little moisture? It balls up and rolls off when I try to sweep it back down. Is this a sign I need to add more milk?
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| # ? Jun 03, 2008 07:36 |
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Flantastic posted:Chachu, those colors are great. For the cones you need to pretty much be eating them on the day they're baked, or they do get sort of... chewy as they absorb moisture from the cake. Some cones are better than others. I remember the time I did this I used the plain (not sugar) Nabisco cup kind and they were OK. These cupcakes are really best made for kids though, who will think it's awesome and are unlikely to notice if the cone is less than crisp.  Re: your frosting. If you mean that it kind of rolls itself up and is quite stiff then yeah, you might need more milk. If you mean that it's kind of running down, the cake is probably not quite cool enough (it needs to be *completely* cool). This can also happen if it's just too hot out, unfortunately!
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| # ? Jun 03, 2008 09:12 |
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chachu posted:Woohoo! I am about as amateur as cooking/baking gets, but I've been trying more since my daughter was born. I didn't think I could make one of these--at least, not a good one, but lo and behold: The cake looks amazing! How did you pour it in? The layers are slightly more horizontal than mine were, and it looks neat! Also: Using bowls and a spoon/clean finger/silicon spatula might work better than ziplocs for quicker clean up and saving batter. It seems like pouring from a ziploc would be easier but retrieving the batter would be harder.
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| # ? Jun 04, 2008 20:01 |
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Bean Trap posted:The cake looks amazing! How did you pour it in? The layers are slightly more horizontal than mine were, and it looks neat! I mixed up all the batter, then I spooned it into Ziplocs (this was the messy part, and I won't be doing it this way again). I mixed the food dye in the bags, then cut a really small corner off the bag. I put the red down in one big clump in the centre, then spread that out with a spoon or spatula or something. Each colour afterwards, I squeezed out in a spiral, then spread it out. I think this is why my colour layers go fat-thin-fat-thin-fat, but I'm not sure. I just did two pans then put them on top. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be.
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| # ? Jun 05, 2008 05:50 |
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Using Anony Mouse's method of separating the colors this is what I ended up making. Excuse the frosting, I absolutely hate decorating. 
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| # ? Jun 05, 2008 06:55 |
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Ozark, I love it! The outside is so monotone. and then the inside is great. I hope it was a surprise to whoever ate it. I have an amazing idea, but I'm afraid it will have to wait a week until I can show you guys My next cake I have to make is due next Saturday, so just hold on until then.
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| # ? Jun 05, 2008 08:32 |
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Here's a stupid question: I plan to make a rainbow cake for a friends birthday. I still have lots of time (3 weeks) so I decided on a practice run. However all food colouring I could find in the grocery store was yellow, red, blue, green. no more than 4 colours. And since I plan on using lemon cake batter at least for the practice run, yellow isn't even needed. Now, this is Germany so things may be a little different, but could any of you post a link to a site that shows the food colouring you used? Maybe I can find out where to buy it to have it shipped here, or whether there is a German brand similar to it.
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| # ? Jun 06, 2008 09:35 |
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Hopper posted:Here's a stupid question: I just used the red, yellow, green, then mixed blue with red for purple. I'm sure you could mix red with yellow to get orange if you were so inclined.
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| # ? Jun 06, 2008 09:55 |
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Hopper posted:And since I plan on using lemon cake batter at least for the practice run, yellow isn't even needed. You want ROY G BIV, not ROy G BIV.
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| # ? Jun 06, 2008 16:33 |
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If you have a good mainstream craft store, like a Michael's, then you'll be able to get the Wilton's gel food coloring. I've used it in the past (just not for our attempt at the rainbow, which I'd have taken pictures of, but we ate it), and they are the best at getting a really vibrant color. Just don't use too much. a bit on the end of a toothpick is a good start for most applications, and will give you some great color. Also, if you pick up the 'deluxe' kit, there are about 16 colors, including black and fleshtone. Yes, fleshtone.
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| # ? Jun 06, 2008 16:44 |
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chachu posted:I just used the red, yellow, green, then mixed blue with red for purple. d'oh that's what I get for not thinking outside the box...actually mixing might be an idea. I have also found food coloring in 5 colors (red, yellow, green, blue, orange) special for use in dough today. Weirdly enough in a store for arts and crafts ?!
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| # ? Jun 06, 2008 17:13 |
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