Yesterday, during one of those rare times that I had a bit of extra free time, I thought of doing a rainbow chiffon cake but in a different way.....
Something like this basic colour wheel....
Which, translated into cake will look like this....
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| Pretty cool, right? |
The cake above is an 8" vanilla chiffon (recipe here). Simple enough especially if you have been making this cake over and over again like me. To do this colour wheel effect though, the process is unfortunately not as simple. It is actually quite tedious (and there is so much washing involved!). Doing it once in a while can be quite fun though........so......if you are interested in trying it, here's what you need to do.
Before you can begin making the cake, you first need to prepare your pan by making the cake batter separators. No need to buy anything special here - we are improvising!
Cut out three 8" by 3" rectangles from thin cardboard. Wrap each piece in foil to make it food safe. Fold two of them in half.
Insert the unfolded cardboard upright into the center of your 8" cake pan.
Position the two folded pieces above and below the center divider such that you will get 6 equally-sized wedges.
As my cake pan has a removable bottom, I did not line it anymore with baking paper. I pretty much eyeballed the placement of my dividers. However, if you need to line your cake pan, you can create creases in your baking paper to serve as a guide in placing the dividers. To do this, fold your 8" baking paper circle in half and then into thirds. Open it up to reveal the partitions created by the creases. Line your cake pan then place the foil dividers on top of the creases.
To make the cake batter, simply follow the vanilla chiffon cake recipe. After you have made your eggyolk mixture, divide it equally into 6 bowls. (Weighing your cake batter will give you more accurate results.)
Colour each mixture with rainbow colours. You will only need tiny amounts of gel paste (like a drop) or powdered food colour (a pinch).
Proceed to beating your eggwhites till stiff. Divide this equally among the six bowls. Again, it is best to weigh the mixture for accuracy.
You need to work fairly quickly in folding the meringue into each eggyolk mixture. Be gentle but deliberate. Spoon each mixture into your divided pan and push the cake batter into the corners. Give the pan a gentle tap to level the cake batter and to release any air bubbles.
Carefully remove the dividers by lifting them straight up. Do not bend them sideways or any other way - just pull straight up. Some of the cake batter will stick to the dividers in this process. Don't attempt to put them back into the pan as you might risk messing up the colours! You can reuse the cardboard pieces for next time. Just remove the foil wrapping!
Bake and cool the cake inverted as per usual. (My 4-egg chiffon cake recipe usually bakes up to the top of the pan. However, in this case, as some of the batter was lost, my cake was slightly shorter.)
As with any cake, there will be some browning on the cake top and sides. I find that simply rubbing my fingers gently back and forth against the cake removes this caramelized layer rather easily. When you do this, you will reveal all the vibrant colours! Yey!
I wasn't planning on frosting this cake but here's one idea of what you can do. Cut the cake horizontally in half.
Spread your filling on your bottom layer. Before topping with the other cake layer, rotate it one colour to the right so that the top colour will be different from the bottom.
This way, you will have six different colour combinations in your cake slices!
You can also combine slices to make up a taller slice with all the rainbow colours!
As with most rainbow cakes, the "wow" factor lies mostly on the appearance. The cake itself is pretty much very basic. To take this cake up a notch, you can flavour each colour differently - strawberry for red, orange for orange, lemon for yellow and so on and so forth. Alternatively, you can fill each cake segment with something different. Maybe different fruits or different flavoured frostings? I know it will even be more work than it already is, but it will add some element of surprise to eating this cake, don't you think?
Hope you learned something new today and get to try this yourself! Enjoy the rest of your week :)
