Rainbow Cupcakes

Layers of moist vanilla rainbow cake topped with vanilla buttercream.

After attempting to make my rainbow cake several times, I had got to a point where I felt happy with it. So, I then thought about moving onto making rainbow cupcakes. Was I prepared for how difficult they ended up being to make? Not at all. I thought that the cake was hard, having to separate the mixture evenly and get the correct colours, but the cupcakes were another level. However, they were very worth the pay off in the end when you took a bite out of it and saw the layered colours.

As I did with the cake, I started out by only doing four colours of the rainbow. I do my first attempt like this because I don't want it to be too difficult by throwing myself into all of the colours, but also like I said, it is my first attempt (so can you blame me for wanting to make it a little easier!) Even after my first attempt I have only stuck to doing four colours for the cupcakes because it actually doesn’t get easier even just with doing four.

This is one of my most difficult recipes and when writing the recipe down, I struggled to make it easy to follow. The thing with this recipe is proportions. You can’t separate the cake mix evenly and colour them in the way you do with the cake. You have to separate the cake mix with each bowl having gradually more mixture in them. This is because the bottom colour doesn’t have too much surface area to cover, whereas the top colour has a lot more to cover. I hope that makes sense, I even find it hard to explain it to myself! I have tried two ways of layering the colours and they both seem to be of similar difficulty. They are:

1) I put a spoonful of the colour into the cupcake case and then lightly use the spoon (or a toothpick) to spread the colour around so that it covers the colour beneath it and you can’t see any of that colour.

2) Use piping bags (or food bags), put a colour in each one and then pipe a layer of the mixture into the cupcake cases. Then for each colour, pipe over the colour underneath, leaving none of that colour visible.

Then you can just top the cupcakes off with some vanilla buttercream, and as you can see I just did a simple layer of it and didn’t do anything too fancy decoration wise. When you bite into the cupcake you should see layers of each colour that you added. The layers won’t be as defined as they would be in a cake, as they aren’t individually baked layers and bake together, but if you covered each layer well enough when filling the cupcake cases, then you should at least get a full line of each colour running through the cupcake.

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Difficulty rating: 9/10

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