This month I was invited to the Clandestine Cake Club by my colleague who helps organises it, which was held at Tart cafe on Gloucester Road. The theme was 'Celebration' and what better opportunity to bake my first rainbow cake? I know, you think you've seen enough rainbow cake pictures on Pinterest. I'm here to show you you some more. And possibly prove you right.
Anyway, I saw More Than Toast's Alice make the rainbow cake for her daughter's 2nd birthday this year and that was it! I needed an excuse to make it. Her recipe can be found here. Thanks for the inspiration, Alice!
My friend George, who is already a baker, came round to help me. We simply made a classic victoria sponge batter, which is essentially equal parts eggs, self raising flour, sugar and butter starting from 4 eggs and weighing the rest according to the weight of the eggs.
If you want another sponge recipe, have a look at Hugh Fernley Woppingstaff's here. 
As we only have 3 round cake tins and wanted six layers to the cake, we had to do two batches. Once each set of batter was made up we simply split it into three and mixed different food colouring into each, ending up with six lots of batter. We baked each set at 180 celsius for around 15 minutes.
We left the six cakes to dry overnight before making a LOT of butter cream icing (just butter and icing sugar with a dash of milk to make it more pliable) to spread in between each cake and all around the outside. When we ran out we simply made up more. Kenwood mixers are your friend here. Before spreading the icing, each cake had some of the roundness shaved off the top to make sure they were flat enough that the whole thing didn't end up looking like the tower of Pisa.
What I will say is that rainbow cakes are basically just 6 sponges with food colouring, assembled and plied with an awful lot of butter cream icing. Layer them like a rainbow or, as we did, on a gradient from light to dark. Whatever you do, make sure you put so much icing around the outside that it just looks like another sponge cake. This way, people will ignore it until you say "hm, shall we try a slice?" and then when you do, it's such a cool surprise that you get a big round of applause. Fantastic for life's show offs and those that like a bit of delayed gratification.
I'll be doing this for my niece's fifth birthday, who has a particular fondness for food related trickery. She is a very big fan of soft boiled eggs, which give her no end of enjoyment when she presents the eggshell upturned once the egg itself is devoured to various family members so it appears like a new egg. Queue some of the biggest 4 year old smiles around as she congratulates herself on a trick well played. Long may this tradition continue.
See, just looks like a boring sponge cake sprayed gold, doesn't it? Ta da:
Fun, no?
Anyway, back to the Clandestine Cake Club: I went, I saw, I ate. I'm glad I went to the cake club and really enjoyed having a cup of tea, meeting other cake lovers, seeing everyone's interpretation of 'celebration' and, most importantly, eating a lot of cake. Tart was very festive on a cold Tuesday evening, with some beautiful Christmas decorations up it felt very cosy and what's more cosy than tea and cake?
Everyone made such an effort at the cake club with the flavours and decorations, it's a really lovely monthly meetup if you fancy going along. Thanks, Gemma, for having me and George!
Have a look at some of the beautiful cakes people made:
If you love cake, get in touch with the CCC and go along to the next meet up in January.
