The Rainbow Cake

One of the greatest annoyances I bestow on anyone who knows me is that I never live in the present. I either wallow in the past or worry about the future. If we go on holiday, instead of being excited on my last day at work, I worry about how shit I’ll feel when I get back in the office after the holiday.

It’s very annoying for everyone concerned because it means that even the most exciting parts of life are made ordinary; I suppose I am the John Coffey of happiness.

Anyway, this personality deformity obviously applies acutely to birthdays and it was my birthday the other day. I didn’t want to have the annual farce of dreading the feeling of having had the birthday and therefore not looking forward to the birthday, even though the birthday hadn’t happened and I never properly looked forward to it in the first place because I was too sad about it being over.

And so I thought that in the two weeks leading up to my birthday, I would make a terrific song and dance about it. I don’t like imposing songs and dances on other people because sometimes, when certain people insist that I attend a song/dance on behalf of them, I dread going. And I would hate to think that someone was dreading attending something I’d got myself into such a frenzy about organising (so much so that I’d briefly considered getting sectioned).

So yes, I decided to make my own personal song and dance and then tell everyone about it so they could pretend they were there. And if they were dreading being there, they could, like, not read this post.

I decided to make the most labour-intensive, disgustingly sweet, embarrassingly kitsch, fashion-foody cake I could find: The Rainbow Cake. YUCK. I am a total hypocrite, by the way; if you admit to that, does it assuage the hypocrisy?

 So, happy bloody birthday to me. The weeks of planning and eBay ordering and visits to Tesco and sourcing of egg whites and researching how to do this and how to do that have meant that for me, at least, my birthday has been SUCH an event (briefly scuppered when I saw a magazine in the newsagents telling the world how to do a much easier and probably better-tasting version of this cake but whatever, I was too far down the line to change).

 I got the original recipe from Whisk Kid who, as far as I can tell, invented this cake. It’s not for the fainthearted: 19 egg whites (NO YOLKS!), just under a kilogram of butter, too much sugar to comprehend, enough e-numbers to see you safely off to the ozone layer and the most ridiculous, notoriously temperamental icing (Swiss Meringue Buttercream).  

The lazy-man's alternative to a life-sentence of egg separation.

Surprisingly, everything went….well….okay. If my kitchen was a person, it would have been packing its bags and making its way down to the Priory for a long stay. Thankfully though, it’s a room in a house.

 I won’t go into the ins and outs of this but I found this tutorial very useful, the food colourings were bought from this ebay seller, which was recommended to me by Alice. Alice’s post was also extremely useful…with a cautionary tale that saved my bacon!

 Luckily, I found a lot of helpers to eat the cake for me. This is not my kind of cake…it’s too sweet and Amercian-y tasting. I also didn’t really like the flavour of the buttercream, which was flavoured with lemon extract….and I love lemon! This was made purely for the challenge and the photos! Enjoy!

This is ME! On my BIRTHDAY!

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