Rainbow Butterfly Cake

Pictures are temporarily lost due to website change, I will pop them back in!

For Boo's second birthday I decided to get a bit creative and make rainbow cake. I was originally going to make butterfly cake, but when I thought about icing it I got cold feet, so I decided to make cake with butterfly's on, this way I could ready-roll ice the cake which covers a multitude of sins.

To start with I made the butterfly's, we got some plunger cutters and a multitude of coloured icing, this proved to be a bit more entertaining than expected, Boo developed quite the taste for butterflies and we lost a number of batches when she got loose in the kitchen!

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After a bit of research we went with Wilson dyes to colour the cake batter, and experimented with some cupcakes to ensure the colours seemed about right:

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Then I started about making the cake, this was made in two batches, using a 6 egg recipe. This was then split out into 5 bowls of roughly equal amounts and the dye was added until I got the desired colours. To achieve the desired effect in the batter I added the mix in a spoonful at a time from each bowl.

My gift to you is a baking hack: to get the perfect cake

mix weight out the shelled eggs and then add in an equal

weight in sugar, butter and self raising flour!

I used the flattest looking cake for the base, then cut the top off the second to give a nice flat top for the top of the cake. I covered both cakes with apricot jam (and used it to sandwich them together which was a bad idea) and then covered the whole lot in rolled marzipan flooded by rolled icing.

Finally I added the butterflies, gluing them on with a little bit of writing icing. Here is the finished product:

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All in all it was a pretty easy make, the biggest difficulty was organising the bowls of different colours, and though it looked pretty I'm not sure I would make the marble sponge again, it would be far easier to make single layers of each colour, which is probably what I'd do for Boo's 3rd birthday.

#Baking #Food #Cake #Butterfly #CakeDecorating