Rainbow cupcakes

If a rainbow could be made into a person, that person would be a lot like my friend Jane. Everything you could say to describe a rainbow describes Jane - bright, happy, magical, rare.

I made these rainbow cakes in celebration of Jane's birthday. I didn't see Jane for her birthday but I made these at home in tribute of when we were at uni together and would bake cakes. In fact, Jane taught me a recipe for cupcakes that has now developed into the recipe that I use every week.

So firstly, I made my favourite vanilla cake recipe but before cooking I split the batter. I would recommend that you split it equally into six bowls and then mix your colours.

I didn't split them equally and I regretted it. I tried to have a little more red so I could then add blue to make purple, etc. But as you can see from my pics I ended up with hardly any purple batter and therefore tiny cakes. Whereas I had loads of red and green batter and ended up with an unevenly sized batch.

To mix the colours all you need is red, yellow and blue food colouring and then combine them to make the colours in between. Red + yellow = orange. Yellow + blue = green. Blue + red = purple. If you can find orange, green and purple food colouring however, you are likely to get better colour that is less muddy. I already had green so I just mixed red and yellow to make orange and red and blue to make purple.

I added the food colouring directly to the batter instead of mixing it first. That meant I could see exactly what effect the colouring had on the batter. As the batter has a yellow tint anyway I needed to use more food colouring on the blue and purple to lose the yellow-ish colour.

I used coloured cases to match to add to the effect and after they were baked I frosted them with cream cheese frosting and sprinkled with rainbow coloured hundreds and thousands.