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.

Yellow flowers and butterfly vanilla cupcakes

So, I've got my frosting down now! This week I made the same recipe as last week which I have almost perfected now! Vanilla cupcakes with cream cheese frosting (piped with a freezer bag).

I used yellow cases and decorated with some yellow flowers and white hearts with yellow jimmies to make butterflies. I bought the jimmies in NYC from Macy's Martha Stewart collection when I was over there in July for my birthday.

I also used decorated a few with hundreds and thousands to add some extra colour.

Frosting success!! Vanilla cakes with cream cheese frosting and hundreds & thousands

Hurray! I have mastered the cream cheese frosting that I've been trying to accomplish for weeks! And all it came down to was using a whisk instead of a wooden spoon to mix the frosting together.

I used the exact same recipe as last time and I decorated them this week with hundreds & thousands / tiny sugar balls.

This week I also tried something with the piping bag for the first time. I used a zip lock bag, as usual, to pipe out the frosting but instead of cutting across the corner to make a hole, I cut two very small slits going up the bag. This, effectively created a four corner star shape. It wasn't a very defined star, I need to practice to make the slits very delicate, but still was very effective.

I also need to practice making circles with a piping bag because every time I go round I seem to make more of a triangle shape!

I'm very pleased with the outcome, I think they look great. The cakes are absolutely delicious!!