Big Pimpin' Rainbow Cake!

It was my little brothers 21^st birthday on the 2^nd on Jan, but being the holiday period, he postponed his party until last weekend. It was a ‘Big Pimpin’ themed party, so I thought it only right to attempt a big pimpin’ cake.

I have seen this cake many times on various blogs, and pinterest, so I thought I would give it a go. It turned out better than I thought, and I’ve even had a request to bake it for my nephews birthday in June.

(sorry the pictures aren’t that great, I’ll get some better ones the next time I make it)

For the cakes, I used my all time favourite recipe, it’s easy, and it works, but if you have a recipe you love, by all means use that. I doubled my mixture, and it was perfect. I also used buttercream icing, but I think cream cheese icing would work well too.

Ingredients

450g unsalted butter

450g caster sugar

450g self raising flour

2 tsp baking powder

8 eggs

2 tsp vanilla extract

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue & purple food colouring

Ingredients for the icing

750g Icing sugar

450g unsalted butter

2 tsp vanilla extract

Method

Grease and line as many (same size) round cake tins as you have, or as will fit in your oven. Preheat oven to 180C

Combine butter, caster sugar, flour, baking powder, eggs & vanilla extract and beat with an electric mixer until smooth (about 2-3 minutes). Separate mixture into 6 smaller bowls to mix in the colour. I didn’t do anything technical here in regards to even amount, I just put the same number of same sized blobs in each bowl until I had used all the mixture. Then add the food colouring, and stir it in. Don’t be shy with this as the colour will fade a bit when  you bake them.

Pour the mixture into the prepared pans and bake for about 10-15 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Leave the cakes to cool in the pan for 5 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack. Re grease and line the pans and repeat with the remaining batter.

Once all six cakes and baked and cool, it’s ready to assemble the cake. Now I baked the cakes on Friday night, and assembled and iced on Saturday, so there is no need to rush to do it all in one day, if you don’t have too.

I trimmed any cakes that were a bit lopsided, so they were even, then stacked them on top of each other, and trimmed the edges so they were all the same size.

Now, make the icing by combining all the ingredients and beating with an electric beater until smooth. You can add colour if you want, but I just left it as it was, it looks great against the colours of the cake.

Start by placing the purple layer on the plate, or cake board that you are going to serve the cake on, then place a dollop of the icing in the centre and spread out. You don’t want it to be too thick, otherwise the cake will be too tall, then repeat with the blue cake, then the green cake, then yellow, then orange, then red. If you think the cake is a little unstable, now is a good time to put some wooden skewers through the middle, I didn’t need to on mine.

Now, crumb coat your cake. This is basically putting a thin layer of icing over the top and sides, filling in the gaps and making it easier to ice. Once the crumb coat is done, pop the cake in the fridge for the icing to harden, about 10-15 minutes. Now you can ice it! I usually start at the top and work down the sides, but do whatever works best for you.

You can of course decorate it however you like. I’ll probably do some piped flowers or something next time, but this time, I just wrote ‘Big Pimpin’ on the top.

You can't really see the bottom purple layer in this photo, it was dark, but you get the general idea.

It was so fun making these cakes! I enlisted my Sister in Law to come and help me bake them, and we were so happy with the outcome!