"Peppermint" rainbow cake

I am home with Adam while he's on bed rest. I had plenty of other things I could be doing, like all the housework I had neglected during the last month while working on the Grinch party we just had. I did work some on that but I took most of today for fun stuff...crafting and baking.

The largest and most time consuming project I did was making a rainbow cake I had seen online a little while back. I kept it in the back of y mind as something I wanted to make someday when I had a reason to. My chance to try it out came this week. We are having our Faith in God activity tomorrow (Wed.) and I was asked to bring dessert. Since I had extra time on my hand I don't normally have, I figured I might as well. I also made little bracelets for the girls.

For the rainbow cake, I made up the batter from a box mix. I divided it into 6 bowls and used regular food coloring to make an assortment of colors.

All you have to do is plop the first color directly into the center of the pan, take the next color and plop it directly in the middle of the first color and so on until you finish all the colors. Each color you put in simply spreads the proceeding colors out. They don't mix. It comes out looking like rings of colors.

It might be a mess, but I liked the looks of this mess.

Baked:

I thought long and hard about how to decorate the cake. I was at Kroger when it came to me. Since it was for a Christmas activity, I would make it look like a peppermint.

I cut out a circle to use as a guide. I stuck toothpicks in the cake to suspend the paper. When I was done with the paper, I removed the toothpicks and smoothed out the frosting in that area. I used a knife to "scoop up some sugar I had dyed red and placed it on the cake where I wanted.

I finished the stripes on top and moved to the more difficult side stripes. Even with the cake stand tilted all the way down, it just wasn't at a good angle to throw sugar at but I eventually got it.

I didn't want to level the cake before I flipped it onto the board so I had a gap all the way around the bottom. That means I needed a border at the bottom.

I went through two other tips before I decided on this one.

So here it is. It was fun but not something I can do very often.