My Cake Wreck

For preschool we’ve been talking about spring and how the weather can be crazy, especially during March and April.  As a side note, we barbecued salmon and ate outside on Wednesday then today it snowed.  That’s Utah weather for you. So we’ve been talking about rain and rainbows among other things.  I thought today it would be fun to make a rainbow cake (Em made one with Sir O a while ago but I can’t find the link) so we could talk about colors and rainbows some more while baking it.

Now, I’m usually more of a cupcake kind of girl but thought for this little activity a full size cake would be better to show the colors.  My mom makes rainbow cakes a school every year and recommended giving Peanut some batter in a little cup to mix the color in herself.  She was really good at mixing color into the top 1/2 inch of the cup so I had to stir the color into the rest of it after she was done.  I wanted more spring-like colors so I didn’t use too much food coloring.

I decided instead of doing all the colors in both layers I’d do one layer in the warms and one layer in the cools.

We baked them and the house quickly filled with the sweet fragrance of warm cake.  When the timer rang I checked to make sure they were done and pulled them out of the oven to cool.  I was planning on a beautiful cake like Omnomicon’s.  We were going to frost it with white frosting so the colors would pop a little and top it with green sprinkles.  It was going to be beautiful!

Well, here’s how it really turned out.

Not quite as I’d imagined.  Apparently I didn’t grease the pans enough so the cakes stuck and came out in crumbs and pieces.  Did I mention I’m more of a cupcake kind of girl?  Yeah.  Obviously there are reasons for that.

I attempted to salvage the cakes with frosting but it just went downhill.  Fast.  After trying to frost down a bit of the sides I realized it just wasn’t happening, smeared the frosting around the top, added sprinkles, and called it good.  Peanut didn’t seem to mind that it wasn’t beautiful and it still tastes good.  We shared a piece after lunch.

The colors turned out pretty and now I know to really grease my pans well.  Ah, experience.