I am an avid pinner =) and decided to use Pinterest to help me in creating my daughter's birthday theme. I pinned everything Rainbow and came across the infamous "Rainbow Cake" on Pinterest. If you are on the site, you've seen this cake. It's 6 layers of different colored cake with filling between each layer and coated with a beautiful white butter cream frosting. It looks like this;
There are two recipes of this Super Epic Rainbow Cake floating around the Internet. Martha Stewart's and The Whisk Kid (who originally created this recipe). Martha pretty much just copied The Whisk Kid's recipe, not sure if she was claiming it as her own, but probably a good thing that she didn't (more on this later).
You can find the recipe here http://www.whisk-kid.com/2009/08/say-it-with-cake.html
I began my preparations to make this monster of a cake. Go figure the first cake I decide to make, from scratch, is the Super Epic Rainbow Cake!! It took a little over 4 hours to make and this was while I was chasing my two kiddos around (don't ask me how this miracle of baking a cake while taking care of two kids was accomplished). I was Super Excited when all the cakes were complete. I had dyed each one and baked for the recommended 15 minutes and then I jumped the gun; I assembled all the cakes on top of each other, walked into the other room, came back into the kitchen and looked at my cake. Hmmmm something just wasn't right...
OH YEAH, there should be frosting between each layer! HA My excitement of seeing the cake completely stacked together with all its wonderful colors overwhelmed me, that I forgot the dang frosting! I disassembled and prepared myself and kitchen to make the frosting.
THE BUTTER CREAM FROSTING - This is a story in itself. I made the frosting EXACTLY like the recipe called and when it was all said and done, I pretty much just had a frothier version of butter. Now, I know what you may be thinking, "Well, it IS a butter cream frosting recipe. Of course, there is going to be butter in it." Nope, you don't understand, that's pretty much all it was.
The fill/crumb coat frosting took 4 sticks of butter as called for in the recipe. However, my frosting never got fluffy and taken the advice of sticking it in the fridge to firm up and then whipping it again, the frosting never came too. The Whisk Kid also recommends adding more butter to help it along and this is what I did. So rather than 4 sticks of butter in the fill/crumb coat layer, I now had 5!
After layering the cakes, adding the fill/crumb coat, I stuck it in the fridge until the following day. On this day, I was going to make the "pretty" frosting that was going to give my cake the polished look I was hoping for. It happened, the frosting turned out beautiful and I applied it like Martha herself, except I had to add another stick of butter to make the frosting come together. The recipe called for 2 and I added 3. Are you doing the math now?
YES - There was 8 sticks of butter in the frosting alone!!!! This didn't include what went into the actual cake... this makes 10 sticks of butter in the entire production!!!
My family and I had some friends over the following night, so I thought I would go ahead and serve my masterpiece that I slaved for two days making and which also broke my wallet (the cost of ingredients added up). The moment had arrived and my husband made the first cut (I'm not allowed to handle sharp objects in this house). It was beautiful!!! Picture perfect! The layers were gorgeous and the colors of the cake looked so striking against the white frosting.
Now, the taste test...
It wasn't the best or worst cake I've ever had, but after following the recipe to a T, I was pretty disappointed. I'm not sure if Whisk Kid is holding something out on the rest of us so that she is able to get her cake picture perfect and taste extraordinary (this is my assumption), but it certainly was no prize cake. The cake itself came out doughy and actually tasted a little like play-doh despite the vanilla extract added into it (I've seen reviews of others commenting the same on her blog). The frosting was lemony because it called for the lemon extract but also because I added more extract to taste. But there was still an underlying problem, the butter. It tasted like pure butter!! PURE BUTTER! My husband and friends joked I shouldn't have went through the trouble of making the frosting, a few tubs of butter slatherd over the entire cake would have sufficed and they were right! We scraped as much of the frosting off as we could and ate the cake.
After our friends had left and the dishes were clean, I wrapped the cake with plastic wrap and stuck it in my fridge. This was a few weeks ago and it still sits there, with a section from the night we tried it, missing. No more, no less. I can't bare to throw it away. It needs to go. It's not edible, but I can't seem to part ways with it because its just so beautiful and maybe because its my first made-from-scratch food I've ever made. Maybe I will dip it into a bucket of apoxy and put it on display =P
My plans for my daughter's actual birthday cake still consist of making the Rainbow cake, it just wont be Super Epic - 2 white vanilla box cakes (also a little easier on the wallet) and then a simplier butter cream frosting recipe. Hopefully with a lot less butter!
Cheers, Kim
