Rainbow Cake

For my 22nd birthday I decided to go the direction of sheer novelty and make myself a rainbow cake, something I’ve been dyeing (snicker snicker) to do for ages.

With some swell inspiration at hand, I set out my supplies and got to work.

My Neon Rainbow Birthday Cake – The “light” way

Cake

• 1 box vanilla cake mix – I used Betty Crocker French Vanilla
• 1 can diet soda – I used Diet Sparkling Lemonade
• Food Colouring – I used a box of NEONs

Cream Cheese Icing

• 1 8oz package light cream cheese, softened
• 1 cup icing sugar
• splash of milk

Filling (*Optional – see step 6)

• 1 box Instant Vanilla Fat Free Jello Pudding

Instructions

1. Mix the vanilla cake mix with the diet soda ONLY. Don’t follow the cake box instructions.

2. Divide the batter into 4 separate bowls (or however many colours you have) and dye each one a separate colour. Use quite a few drops for a more vibrant colour.

3. Pour the dyed batter into two separate cooking sprayed cake pans in proportions and order like seen below.

4. NOW pay attention to the cake box and bake according to its temperature and time. Poke it once time’s up and see if it needs to stay in a bit longer. Use your savvy baking discretion.

5. While cakes are baking, whip up that frosting by beating together the softened cream cheese, icing sugar, and adding however much milk you need to make it a good consistency (I used less than 1/4 cup).

6. *OPTIONAL – I had to use pudding to hold the cake layers together because I didn’t make enough icing and didn’t have any more cream cheese to make more. If you’d rather (I would have. The pudding was kind of gross but I had minimal resources for cake sticking), just make more of the icing and sandwich that in between the two layers. But if you, like I, run out of cream cheese and happen to have instant pudding on hand, whip it up for your cake’s centre.

7. Once the cakes are done, let them cool completely before removing from pans, otherwise they’ll probably fall apart all over the place. Cake made with diet pop is fragile.

8. Stick layers together with chosen filling, ice with prepared icing, decorate however you prefer.

I preferred the girly face. And I had very minimal cake decorating resources. And my cake decorating skills are slightly sub par…

9. Plate, light, wish.

10. Cut, plate, devour.

Word of Warning: This cake was not made with a concern for taste or naturalness in mind. It was purely for novelty purposes. It has plenty of fake junk in it. It tasted pretty good but was NO comparison to a real cake recipe. I just really really wanted a diet pop rainbow cake.

That being said, rainbow cakes are incredibly versatile and you could easily make this with a box of vanilla cake mix actually following the proper instructions instead of the pop method or better yet, making your favourite vanilla cake recipe from scratch and then dying that batter.

Obviously you could also do whatever icing and filling you want as well.

Do yourself a favour and Google “Rainbow Cake”, get incredibly inspired, rush out to buy some vibrant food colouring and get caking!