Rainbow Cake

We felt inspired to make a Rainbow Cake this afternoon.  Our lovely friend Mel (also our most brilliant nursery chef!) suggested an idea for Rainbow Cupcakes last week.  We tried it at pre school and it worked well.  Here is our large scale version.
Ingredients; 150g butter, 150g caster sugar, 3 eggs, 150g self raising flour, vanilla extract, a variety of food colourings.

Cream the butter and sugar together.  Then beat in the eggs one at a time.  Add some vanilla extract.  Then fold in the flour gently.

Then you will need six small bowls.  Divide the mixture equally into the small bowls.  Then add food colouring to make the different colours of the rainbow (or you could be abstract and just choose colours of your choice more randomly).  We did; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple (we mixed red and blue for this.)  One thing I did learn from the cupcake version we did last week is that 'natural' red colouring turns brown when baked so if you want the real pillar box look we managed today then you do have to go for the e numbers I'm afraid.

Once mixed, spoon the mixture into the cake tin (we used two 20cm sandwich tins) in the order you want them to be.  I forgot to photograph this bit (crazy, I know!) so you'll need to imagine I'm afraid.  You could do it in blobs or vertical strips or horizontally if you were really clever and patient!
Bake in the oven at 180 for about 25 mins.
Once cool you can fill the cake with either butter cream or jam.  Decorate it however you like.  Coloured smarties might look good.  We had run out of icing sugar so we went for jam filling and a sprinkle of sugar on top.  It would make a fantastic cake for a Rainbow Party.  It's lots of fun whatever you make it for!