Summer/ Rainbow Birthday Cake!

Summers coming! 

I made this a few weeks ago as it was one of my flatmates 21st birthday. It's a relatively easy recipe to make but it does take a few hours to make because of all the icing required. It's a standard vanilla cake with a few drops of food colouring added. I used concentrated paste instead of normal liquid food colouring in order to get a more vibrant colour. If you want it even brighter still then I've read a lot of reccomendations for gel colouring, but at £15 a box it can be quite pricey! I used the following ingrediants to make 2 layers of the cake and then repeated the process to make the last 2 so dont try and spread out the following recipe over four cake tins otherwise you're going to end up with pitifully flat layers.

• 3 Eggs- Beaten
• 6 Oz Self Raising Flour
• 6 Oz Cater Sugar
• 6 Oz Softened Butter
• Tsp Vanilla Essence
• Tbsp Baking Powder
• Tbsp Milk
• Food colouring of your choice!

For the Icing:

• 300g Softened Butter
• 300g Soft Cheese
• 500g Icing Sugar

• Preheat oven to 180 degrees
• Mix the butter and caster sugar together until fluffy
• Add the vanilla essence and the milk
• Then slowly add the eggs
• Using a sieve add the flour and then add the baking powder
• Separate the mixture into two cake tins and add a few drops of food colouring to each tin.
• Make sure to give each mixture a good stir so that the food colouring completely coats everything.
• Place tins in oven for around 20 minutes until cakes are completely cooked.
• Repeat the process for final to layers.
• Once cakes are cooked leave them to cool and start making the icing by mixing everything together until its smooth but firm, make sure that the butter is completely softened so that it doesn't make any lumps.
• If icing doesnt seem very firm then place it in a fridge for 30-60 minutes (this is what I had to do!)
• put on thin layer over cake and then place it in fridge for 30 mins, repeat layering process 2-3 times so that icing covers the cake.
• Decorate as desired!

I called mine summer cake because the icing came out a bit lumpy due to unsoftened butter (I have warned you so that you don't make this mistake!). The lumpy icing meant that I panicked a little bit and hid it under a lot of wafer flowers, butterflies and multi coloured icing discs. In the end I was really proud of the the appearance of the cake (I did manage to hide most of the lumps under a final layer of icing haha!) and happily lit some candles to sing 'Penblwydd Happus' to my flatmate. Luckily I wasn't the only one singing so I didn't make her ears bleed!

Got Cake?!