There’s something about rainbows that make people happy and I’m no exception. I’ve done rainbow cakes before and I recently had the urge to do another cake. Yes, it’s not the easiest thing to make, but the end result is just so pleasing to the eye that it makes it worth it. Many rainbow cakes are just straight-up vanilla, but I wanted some flavour to mine, so I did a pineapple/rum cake with coconut swiss meringue buttercream and I gotta say, I like this combination.

I adapted a simple white cake recipe from Allrecipes.com and made 2 batches of that, making a batch with pineapple flavouring (if anyone knows how I can get intense pineapple flavour without using artificial flavouring, I’ll be most grateful!) and another with rum. To be honest though, I couldn’t smell nor taste the rum in the cake, so I ended up spooning rum onto the cake before frosting it. So you can make the 2nd batch a plain vanilla one instead. I decided to use desiccated coconut flakes for decoration as well, I’m not the best at frosting so some form of masking my terrible frosting job was required. This cake is far from perfect, I’m in awe of those people whose rainbow cakes come out in perfect layers, but I think it’s good enough for me 🙂

White Cake Recipe x 2

• 1/2 to 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup (113g) room-temperature butter
• 2 eggs
• 1 tablespoon pineapple flavouring (batch 1)/vanilla extract (batch 2)
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 cup milk
• Food gel colours – purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and red

Method

1. Preheat oven to 175 degrees C. Grease and flour 6 8-inch baking pans (use disposable ones, way more convenient).
2. In a medium bowl, cream together the sugar and butter. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then stir in the pineapple flavouring/vanilla. Combine flour and baking powder, add to the creamed mixture and mix well. Finally stir in the milk until batter is smooth.
3. Split each batch of batter into 3 bowls. Alternate the layers of flavour (pineapple, rum, pineapple, rum…so the purple, green and orange layers has pineapple flavour and blue, yellow and red is vanilla) and mix in the gel colours to get your desired effect.
4. Pour or spoon batter into the prepared pans.
5. Bake for 15-18 minutes in the preheated oven. Cake is done when it springs back to the touch.
6. Leave to cool completely
7. Wrap in cling wrap and put in refrigerator for at least 30 minutes

I made 2 batches of coconut swiss meringue buttercream using this recipe.

Assembly

1. Trim off any brown bits of the cakes
2. Put a dollop of buttercream on the cake board or serving plate to anchor the cake.
3. Place the purple layer first and frost
4. Place the blue layer and spoon rum onto the cake before frosting
5. Continue with the rest of the layers, spooning rum onto the vanilla layers
6. Crumb coat the cake and leave it in the refrigerator for another 30 minutes
7. Frost the cake with the remaining buttercream and generously put on desiccated coconut flakes for decoration