Gayathri's Cook Spot: Rainbow Cake With Ombre Frosting

Yesterday it was my daughter Sruti's birthday. For this day my daughter has been planning since 6 August. One fine day on August 2013, she came to me with i pad and asked me to look at a video clip on how to make a rainbow cake. And after I finished watching, she told me that I have to bake this cake for her birthday. I said OK and have been looking for different frosting techniques since then for the perfect birthday cake. I came upon so many techniques but every technique seemed either so easy or so tough. Finally I settled on Ombre technique. Ombre means shaded in French. This is used everywhere nowadays. A colour along with many shades of the same colour applied in a certain way makes it ombre. Even there is ombre hair colouring. So I decided to do Ombre Frosting with my daughter's favourite colours purple and pink.

And for the rainbow cake usually there are only 6 layers but I chose to make VIBGYOR. So ended up with a 7 layer cake. And then came my confusion. I was not sure about the colour Indigo. Again Google came to my help. After finding about indigo's combinations, I set out to make 7 cakes. It was a daunting task. Each cake took 10 minutes to bake. And I had only two 8" pans. I used my regular eggless vanilla cake recipe for this cake. Every 8" cake batch was divided into 3 equal portions and tainted with three colours. So I had to do a third batch for the final layer. The remaining batter became chocolate cupcakes for her Madam.

I didn't want to write her name on the cake. I wanted to keep the top simple with a two toned huge rose in the centre. And here came the idea of adding a cake bunting. Again it is my first bunting and after some struggle, I got it right. I have the instructions posted on Rangoli - My arts blog ( click on link to see the post).. Sruti also wanted some silver sugar balls on the cake. SO mixing mine and Sruti's ideas I made this cake which came out beautiful - atleast for me!!! Please share your views about the cake in the comments.

For The Cake I used this recipe - Simple Vanilla Cake

For The Butter Cream Frosting I used this recipe: Vanilla Butter Cream

For The Simple Syrup, boil together 1 cup of water and one cup of sugar until the syrup becomes sticky. Cool it and use.

For The Filling here is the recipe:

For Dulce De Leche:

1. Take a big deep pan and fill it to 3/4th with water.
2. Bring it to boil.
3. Place the unopened condensed milk tin inside the water and let the water boil for 3 hours.
4. The tin should be immersed in water for the whole time, otherwise it will burst. So be careful.
5. After 3 hours, remove the tin from the water and allow it to cool.
6. Open the can and dulce de liche is ready. Prepare it a day before making the pie to reduce work load.

Dulce De Leche Filling:

Dulce De Leche -5 tbs

1. Cream together butter and dulce de leche.

2. Add a cup of icing sugar and beat until incorporated.

3. Add the remaining sugar and beat until pale.

4. Add a tbs of milk and beat until creamy.

5. If it is too thick, add another tbs of milk.

6. Beat until creamy and use it to fill the cake.

Prepare one batch of batter and divide it into three equal portions.

Colour each with liquid colours or gel colours according to the rainbow colours.

1. Violet - Blue + Red

2. Indigo - Blue + little Red

6. Orange - Yellow + Red

Pour a coloured portion in a greased and dusted cake tin.

Bake in a 175C oven for 10 minutes. Prepare all the colours, cool and arrange on a table.

Mix together dulce de leche and butter.

Add icing sugar and beat.

Beat until pale and creamy.

Apply some frosting on the serving plate and place the violet cake.

Brush generously with the syrup.

Apply the frosting with a spatula.

Now stack the layers according to the rainbow colours using the frosting as the glue. Let it set overnight.

Make butter cream and crumb coat it first. Crumb coat is the first coat of buttercream to fill the gaps and even out the cake layers. Even the crumbs get caught in the frosting and will not spoil the main decoration.

Now according to your colour theme, mix two colours. I used violet and pink. For violet, I added equal droplets of blue and pink liquid colours to the frosting.

Mix until there are no colour streaks.

Mix pink and prepare pink frosting.'

Now remove the unwanted frosting sticking on the plate with a spatula.

On 1/3rd of the cake, apply the violet frosting. A turntable is really helpful for decorating this cake. Keep on rotating the table while you apply the frosting. It is so much easier.

Smooth it out using a spatula while turning the turntable simultaneously. Keep on rotating and you will feel that the cake is going to fall. Don't worry, it is an illusion!!!!

Then apply the pink frosting. Rotate, Rotate, Rotate! Has your head started reeling???

On the final 1/3 rd cake apply the white frosting. Then apply frosting on top and smooth it out.

An offset spatula is really helpful here.

Now bring the spatula to the side and smooth the colours together. Again get ready for reeling!!

Start from the bottom. Keep on turning the table and bring the spatula upwards in a single spiral motion. DO it slowly and you will see that the colours start to merge.

Keep a bowl handy to wipe out the spatula.

Now you can see the colours gradually mingling into each other creating the ombre effect.

With the white frosting and a round tip, get ready to make some pearls.

All the pearls will have a sharp edge but wait till it dries a little. You can make it rounder.

In a bag take both the pink and violet shades side by side with a large rose tip.

Pipe out a rose in the centre of the cake.

Now press the sharp tip of the pearls to smooth it out.

The ombre Rainbow Cake is ready. But there are still some more steps to do before it reaches the party table.

Add a bunting and sprinkle some silver sugar beads.

I know that your little one will enjoy slicing it up and having a sneak at all those colourful layers.

This was the plates we gave to our friends while visiting their homes. A slice of the rainbow cake, two chocolate cup cakes with chocolate frosting and some home made chocolates filled with dulce de leche.