Rainbow cake - tutorial

An old friend from uni has been studying photography, and offered to come by and do a cake smash shoot with my Little Princess. So I decided it would be fun to make a rainbow layer cake I had seen on the Whisk Kid blog.

It didn't smash very well. She gave the big cake a good hard whack, but it did nothing and she lost interest, so instead we gave her just a slice to play with. We had more success and got some beautiful photos, but this left me with a very big cake to use up somehow, so I took it to work and left it in the staff room with a note telling my collegues to have at it.

The rainbow cake had a fantastic reaction, and as a result I found myself making another one for a work collegues birthday, so I took photos as I went to create my very own tutorial.

The first step is to make a cake batter. Any white cake will do, I used Donna Hay's Melt N Mix buttercake. I find this recipe makes 6 cups of batter, making it perfect for a rainbow cake because you can easily divide it into three portions to colour. So first I did red, yellow and orange, and baked each one for 20 minutes in a 20cm tin. Then I repeated the process, this time with blue, green and purple.

Once baked and cooled I like to wrap each cake individually in glad wrap and let it rest, overnight if possible, then I level them, cut off the crusts using a template to make sure all cakes are the same, and get to work layering them.

I made 1 1/2 times more normal buttercream recipe and coloured it white, and put 1/2 a cup between each layer. Measuring it makes sure the layers are even. I like to use purple at the bottom, but that's purely personal preference.

Finally do a quick crumb coat. This is just a really thin layer of buttercream spread over the sides of the cake. As you can see in the picture you will see the layers through the buttercream, and there will be crumbs visible in the buttercream. That's ok. Next step is to let it set in the fridge for at least a half hour so the buttercream crusts up, and then spread it nice and thick with a good layer of buttercream. The first crumb coat will hold all those nasty loose crumbs in place.

Personally I like to then leave the cake just white. It's like a disguise for the beautiful chaos that goes on underneath. But this cake wasn't for me, and I was asked to decorate it with something girly, so I played with my new butterfly and gerbera cutters. I wanted to get some ladybugs on there too, but got dreadfully sick so I couldn't make them.

So there you have it, instructions on how to make your very own rainbow layer cake.

Chocolate chip pikelets

I have no idea at all why it popped into my head, but recently I remembered one time when I was eight, and my parents went to a wedding so my Grandma came to stay the night with my brother and I. I remember two things about that visit - one is the skivvy my Grandma wore that read "Recycled Teenager" (she was a cheeky lady) and the other is the chocolate chip pikelets she made us for dessert. Which she made in the jaffle iron.

Why they were made in the jaffle iron remains a long lost mystery. As does, sadly, the recipe. My Grandma died when I was 14, and before she did I never thought to ask these questions.

But since starting this blog I've found myself getting more and more daring with food, and finally decided chocolate chip pikelets could, quite possibly, just be a process of adding chocolate chips to pikelet batter. So I made some pikelet batter I learned from my mum, who learned it from her dad (Poppy), and tossed in a fistful of dark chocolate chips. Interestingly Grandma wasn't mum's mum, she was dad's mum, so both sets of grandparents had a hand in this dish.

This is Poppy's recipe for pikelets:

1 cup self raising flour

1 teaspoon bicarb

3 tablespoons sugar

pinch of salt

1 egg

2/3 cup milk
2 tablespoons butter

Stir the dry ingredients together, then whisk in the egg and milk. Melt the butter in a frying pan, and pour into the batter, whisking to incorporate it. Cook dessert-spoonfuls of batter in the frying pan until bubbles form, then turn and continue cooking until cooked through.

And as I said, I added a heap of chocolate chips.

Results - As you can see from the picture, the pikelets were not very pretty. Also I understand now why cooking them in the jaffle iron was a good idea. It cooked both sides at once. The chocolate chunks melting made it very hard to flip these pikelets. But OMG, so yummy! This is comfort food at it's best. Simple, warm, chocolately.

Mothers Day

Yesterday was mothers day, so I treated my mum to a three-course dinner. Cooking for mum does have one tiny challenge though - she's a vegetarian. I've put all three dishes into one blog post, because I'm lazy that way.

Entree - Caulflower soup with onion and buttermilk bread

First of all the bread, it was really simple to make, just self-raising flower, chives, buttermilk, and a packet of french onion soup. I used my kitchen mixer to make the dough. But the dough was really sticky, and the resulting bread was very doughy. I didn't love it.

The soup was from Donna Hay's Seasons. It was supposed to have porcini oil drizzled over the top, but I had no luck finding porcini mushrooms. I made it ahead of time, adding the cream and reheating just before serving. I also swapped the chicken stock for vegetable stock, to keep it vegetarian. It was a nice soup, with a very subtle flavour. But it made the house STINK of cauliflower.

Main - spinach ravioli with basil oil

Another recipe from Donna Hay's Seasons, this one involved making the ravioli myself from ricotta, spinach, lemon zest, parmesan, basil and gow gee wrappers. The oil was just basil and lemon juice mixed into olive oil. Then the whole lot was sprinkled with some sliced bocconcini. It had a lovely flavour, but was a bit of a gow gee overload. It wayed my stomach down a bit, so I could only eat about two-thirds of it.

Dessert - Stewed apple and bluberries with coconut cobbler

Again from Donna Hay's Seasons (all these recipes were from the Autumn section). The filling was made up of red apples, blueberries (I used canned), lemon juice, sugar and a vanilla bean. It made my house smell like a candle shop while I was cooking the filling. The cobbler had flour, coconut, vanilla, oats and milk. I loved the fruit filling, the cobbler not as much. It didn't cook properly so it was doughy in the middle, and I think it would have been better without the vanilla. Still this was my favourite of the three dishes.

The most important thing of course was that mum loved her dinner :)