This is guest post from Aleta Meadowlark from the deliciously written food blog Omnomicon. She was nice enough to let us share this post with the community. Make sure to visit the original post: here, for the recipe and all the images of this most colorful rainbow cake.
So I did mention something about health and/or diet food in my last post, and while this recipe is the latter, it is most certainly not to be confused with the former. The cool thing is that if you're making something so distractingly colourful, people will think it's delicious no matter what.
This presents me with the option to use an old Weight Watchers trick—the one-point cupcake. Except I'm making a cake and I created my own frosting. Kinda. I've seen it done before, but I swear I made it up first!
This cake is suitable for many occasions:
- A child's birthday
- Your mom's birthday
- Coming out to your conservative parents
- If you're a lesbian, they'll be thrilled that you won't be forgoing your feminine kitchen duties.
- If you're the kind of gay dude who makes cakes for your parents, they were probably on to you anyway.
- Coming out to your conservative parents on your mother's birthday
- Your friend's jam band CD release party
. . . so I'm sure you'll find a use for this recipe soon.
Oh yes, and do me a favour: DOUBLE THE RECIPE AS PHOTOGRAPHED HERE!! The recipe at the bottom is accurate, but this made for a really REALLY small cake, and there was not nearly enough frosting, especially considering its lightness. Measurements in the text are already doubled and correct.
Okay, on with the ingredients.
That's all. Notice the lack of fat in here? Mmmmmm . . . chemicals. Though I don't need to defend my method thanks to the double-dub (WW) aspect, even when I make a "real" cake I usually use box mix because let's face it: Betty's been doing it way longer than I have, and has pretty much perfected the art.
Pour 2-12 oz cans of soda into two boxes of cake mix. No eggs, no oil, no water, no sweat.
I'm going to round to 60 oz because I have six colours and isn't that just too convenient? It worked out to 1.5 c per colour, measurementwise. So I divvied that up and used my gel colours.
(the gel colours, while not as good as pigment dye, are much bolder than the very liquidy food colouring you probably grew up with)
The first colour you drop into the pan, use about 2/3 of the mix for that colour. Otherwise, the top (last) colour will really dominate. I used a heaping 1 cup of each colour.
Drop the colours, one by one, into the middle of the pan, in neat concentric-ish gobs. Remember the cake is going to be sliced in the side there, so mixing it around on top isn't going to make your slices any more psychedelic (trust me, I did the three-dimensional thinking for you already).
When you're three colours in, start doing the reverse with the other pan. Since I'm going in rainbow order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, I got from red to yellow in the first pan, then purple, blue, green in the second. This is so that your two pans are equal if your measurements aren't exact (and they're not likely to be).
Follow the box's baking instructions and do your dishes.
Now for the frosting: 1 box 2 boxes of fat free sugar free pudding mix, and 16 oz (two of the 8 oz tubs pictured) of fat-free whipped topping. Or sugar-free. Or light. Or regular. They're all pretty much the same. But that's it.
Holy shit, the cake's done! Toothpick clean and everything! Get that shit out of the oven!!!
The purple top kind of made a little turkey silhouette.
The frosting will be a little tough to spread, so treat it like a buttercream (I guess, I've never frosted a cake with buttercream). Putting gobs all over, then smoothing in worked well for me.
Here's what that really should look like: same process, twice the batter.
To see the cake through all the steps and to get the recipe see the original post here.
Omnomicon is updated, faithfully, on Wednesday nights with original recipes. It is somewhat less faithfully updated on Sunday nights with other recipes.
