Rainbow Cake!

I have a major sweet tooth; this isn't a shocking revelation or anything, I've always had it.  Last night, Azi and I enjoyed a fantastic dinner at Kathy's new place (taco night, as usual), and I had it in my head that I wanted to make a cake.  I'd seen a great looking olden days recipe on a local blog through the Bangor Daily News - for something called "Harvard Cake" - apparently named after a person, not the college. This post was actually her first on the blog, aptly named Stop Thinking and Cook, but with the deliciousness, and easy recipe, I'm hoping it will be the first of many!

I started out just making the base white/yellow cake batter, but I wanted it to be prettier, so I took a little bit of the batter in three of my trusty pampered chef prep bowls, and mixed them with food coloring.  I then poured all of the plain batter into the pan, and put plops of colored batter all around, then swirled a knife through it to mix the colors:

The Batter, after I swirled it a bit

Following the recipe, I baked it 25 minutes, and took it out of the oven.  I resisted huge amounts of temptation to keep myself from snitching it before I frosted it.  

Baked cake (it came out a little flat, since I couldn't find my measuring spoons, and apparently didn't use enough baking powder)

The baked cake

While it was cooling, I whipped up the easiest butter cream frosting in the world (butter, vanilla, milk, and powdered sugar).  When the cake was (most of the way) cool, I frosted it with the plain, white frosting (fyi - I made the frosting very soft - if I had planned to just straight up frost it, I'd have probably added more sugar, to make it firmer, and I definitely would have let the cake cool all the way!).

Plain frosted blank slate

Then the fun began anew! I took the leftover frosting, and divided it into two prep bowls, mixed red food coloring in one, and blue in the other, then I dropped spoonfulls of the frosting on top of the cake, in a semi-pattern.

Getting ploppy with the frosting

The last thing I did was rinse off my little metal spatula, and drag it through the different dots.  My final result was one groovy looking rainbow cake! While I know I'll never be a professional cake decorator, it does make me pretty darn happy to be able to whip up something so whimsical in my kitchen on a Wednesday night!!!

My whimsical final product - delicious!