Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Saturday was a depressing, dreary day that made me want to lay in bed and never get up. Despite the mountain of homework I had and the midterms I needed to study for, I managed to do almost nothing all day. I also spent most of the day being unproductive on the internet--checking facebook countless numbers of times, snooping around on the Wilton.com forums, and checking and rechecking my email only to find nothing. Somehow during the course of this I managed to stumble upon pictures of a rainbow cake (here) that looked like a kaleidoscope and immediately brightened my gloomy day. After thinking about this cake all weekend, I was dying to try it, but knowing I was on a diet I really didn't want it sitting in the house. On Monday curiosity got the best of me and, against my better judgment, I tried my hand at this recipe.

**On the website, the author used diet soda to make a "diet cake" that was weight watchers approved, however, I was going to divide this cake up and give it away so I chose to stay with a traditional cake recipe. I also used buttercream icing instead of jello/cool whip.**

Ingredients

Favorite white cake recipe (doubled)
or
8 egg whites
2/3 cup vegetable oil
2 1/2 cup water
2 boxes white cake mix
(This recipe is double the normal amount because you will want the colors to be easily seen. If you use a single recipe of cake the cake will be very flat and won't look as cool)

Mix according to directions, then divide the cake batter into 6 equal portions. Color each portion a different color of the rainbow using gel icing colors (these are more vibrant and won't make your batter runny like the liquid colors). Prepare your cake pans (I used two 9" pans) by greasing and flouring. Starting with the first three colors (red, orange, yellow) measure out 2/3 of each color into the center of the first pan. Then, using the other three colors (purple, blue, green) measure out 2/3 of the batter into the center of the second pan. The idea is to make a rainbow in each pan, so you will need to think about this as you are layering the colors. Then take the first pan and the other three colors (in this case you would take the pan with the red, orange, yellow and add in the rest of the blue, green, and purple. Do this with the opposite pan and opposite colors. When finished, you should have two pans with a rainbow in each. One pan will have the rainbow right side up (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple) and the other pan with a reverse rainbow (purple......red). Bake these according to directions. When they are finished and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, they should look like this.

(Please excuse the picture quality...these were taken with my cell phone)

Once they are cooled you can level them and fill, stack, and ice the cake. You can ice it in whatever color or design you want, I chose white simply because it didn't take a long time and it was pretty exciting to see a boring, white cake and then a rainbow when you cut into it!

This is what the inside of the finished product should look like: