DS wants one of those rainbow coloured layered sponge cakes for his birthday

[FakePlasticLobsters]

Can anyone recommend a good recipe for one?

I've made a chocolate sponge before but these seem a bit ambitious. And what's the best kind of colouring and flavouring for the rainbow?

Have you looked on the goodtoknow recipes site? I get their magazine and there was one in there a month or two ago. Love their recipes as they always seems to just 'work'. Is it where you make 4/5 separate cakes in different colours and sandwich them together, or I am I thinking of the wrong thing?

Make a basic sponge, without chocolate, and add food colouring and some flavour extracts. It shouldn't be all that hard, really.

like this one?

Make a regular sponge then divide the mixture into 3. Add red food colouring to 1/3, green to another 1/3 and leave one plain. Spoon in random blobs into your cake tin and bake as normal. It goes all marbley.

I hadn't heard of that goodtoknow site or gel paste colouring, but yes, that's exactly the sort of thing he wanted, thank you sapphirestar.

I was looking up one of these for my sons birthday. You make up a usual sponge batter, divide it into six and colour each bit with gel food colouring.. Don't use the liquid ones or it wont come out ( at least mine didnt.. ) Then you just put the coloured cake mix into the pan in whichever pattern you like- layered, circling out, random blobs. I haven't actually done this yet as my DS's birthday isn't for a couple of weeks, but I saw it on the internet when my original liquid food colouring effort failed and hers looked great! I typed in colouring cake mix I think into google.

The marbley one sounds good as well Crikey, but the one he had in mind was a stripy one, which he saw in his Winnie the Witch book.

I'm considering myself lucky he only wanted the rainbow bit, because Winnie makes one that is as tall as her house and has seven different types of cake, stacked up like wedding cake, for her party.

I tried to make one today but I couldn't get the vibrant colours you see in photos - peed me right off! Any miracle food dyes, anyone?

Is it horizontal stripes or vertical?

Horizontal you could do by making 3 different coloured cakes and split them lengthways (to make 6) and stack in a pattern.

Friend of mine did this. It looks amazing. But all of the other mums in the room including me seethed with rage knowing that our own efforts later in the year would be very poor in comparison. I have no tips. Sorry!

Use gel colours as they are far stronger than the liquid - Morrisons sell some

You're welcome, hope it goes well! I've never used the gels either, maybe you just make one sponge and give the gels a try just to see how they come out? Then you haven't lost much if it doesn't work, although I find the good to know ones normally do. I have a scrap book full of recipes cut out of the magazines

It's really easy to do, just prepare double quantity cake mix. Divide into 6 bowls and add colour using gel colours (ASDA sell them now).

Place into cake tins and bake the 6 individual batches.

Make up your usual frosting (double qty) and use a thin smear to sandwich each layer (don't be tempted to use too much as the layers will slide around and become unstable)

Then apply an initial crumb coat of frosting, refrigerate for 30 mins before adding final frosting.

It is messy and time consuming and your kitchen will be the biggest fucking tip you have EVER laid eyes on but it will be fab

I've made one of these- used the same method as betty and it came out really well. I used a cream cheese frosting for mine.

The stripes are horizontal ones, but I'm tempted to try a marble one as well, for my friend who has a birthday on the same day but is having a party the week before.

That way I can get the hang of the dyes, marble can look swirly and it won't matter, and she won't be expecting a cake so if it all goes badly wrong nobody will ever have to know, and the dogs can hide the evidence.

Betty thanks for the warning about the kitchen. I'll make sure DH is on washing up duty that day

There is a beautiful one on Pinterest. I will see if I can find a link, otherwise do a search on he Pinterest website.

Actually there are several beautiful ones on Pinterest. I would go to the Pinterest website and type in the search box: rainbow cake

You can get Wilson food colouring gel at Hobbycraft or online. You only need a tiny bit and gives much better colours then the stuff you buy in the supermarkets. If you don't like making cake mix from scratch I can recommend the Betty Crocker mixes (supermarket), they are lovely fluffy.

FX here's a picture of the one I made...

I did it!

I have just done one of these I used gel colours From tesco and a basic sponge mix I did four layers with jam and buttercream in the middle and covered with a shop bought vanilla frosting. Yum

I love the Ombré cakes on Pintrest

My Good Food magazine just popped through the letterbox and the cake on the cover made me think of this thread, have a look for a copy op

This one is a bit lovely I think - www.theimaginationtree.com/2012/09/how-to-make-rainbow-cake.html?m=1

Thank you everyone. I really appreciate all the help and suggestions, especially about the gel colours.

I would never have known they work better than normal food colouring for this sort of thing and probably would have ended up using far too much of the other kind to try and get the right colours.

And I will be looking out for the magazines.

I love this one: sweetapolita.com/2011/04/rainbow-doodle-birthday-cake/