Rainbow (Bright) cake

We have a friend who loves tie dye, and someone suggested that we make a tie dye cake for her birthday. I never actually did that before so I had to do a little research. In case you were wondering there are 4 ways to make a "tie dye" cake. You can:

1) Blend several different colors of fondant together.

(That had no wow factor for me)

2) You can pipe buttercream onto the cake in a tie dye effect and than flatten it out with wax paper

(Also did nothing for me)

3) You can hand paint or airbrush on the tie dye pattern

(We don't have the patience or equipement to do that)



So we settled on the 4th option - dying the cake batter itself.

We've dyed cake mix before, but not like this...

 I found this awesome recipe on How to make a rainbow cake. P.S. if you are going to do this, make sure you get the good gel dye from your local art store. The liquid food dye from the grocery store won't turn out as vivid.This is also the first time we made a cake with diet soda. I couldn't tell the difference and if it cuts back on the calories and fat, hey, I'm all for it! The only thing we noticed was that the cake was a little more sticky than normal, but that also could have been from the gel dye. But it's pretty cool to cut into a seemingly normal cake and get a whole rainbow of colors out. Even I thought and WE made it.

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Help fight cancer

This weekend the baked treat we like to refer to as the "Threesome" made it's bake sale debut and it went over pretty well. A friend who also loves to bake, held the sale as part of a Get Well Gabby event. She raised $400 which she is donating to CHOP in Gabby's name. If you would like to help you can go to Get Well Gabby.

Phoenixville's 4th Annual Bark For Life was also this weekend, which we did not get to participate in. Hopefully we can next year. (If there is anything I love more than cupcakes, it's animals.) To read more about the Bark 4 Life you can visit http://www.relayforlife.org/barkforlife. For other ways to support the American Cancer Society, or to register for the Phoenxiville Relay for Life you can visit The American Cancer Society - 2012 Relay For Life.

You live, you learn

So back to our cakes....soon after the baby shower, a friend was having a summer party and we jumped on the chance to make another cake. A few days before, sitting in Kacie's kitchen I noticed a picture of a cake on the front of Women's Day magazine. We agreed that we were going to make a "watermelon cake". But, WE were going to do it in fondant.

Our first thought was that we needed to get a rounded edge on the cake so we baked it in a large aluminum roasting pan. (We did not have circular cake pans at this time. I think we used like 2 or 3 boxes of cake mix to fill the roasting pan and it had to bake for like an hour. Now, looking back, we could have just taken a regular rectangular cake and carved it to be round but hey, you live, you learn.) Our other thought was that the cake should be pink when you bite into it, like a watermelon, instead of just yellow so we dyed our cake mix. Then once we achieved the colors we wanted for the fondant, we covered the cake and added the details. We took the cake to the party and it was a hit. By far my favorite cake to this day. And it was much easier compared to our first baby shower cakes

Every time we bake something, we learn something new that we didn't know before. Even if it's through error, that's what keeps baking so interesting. It's just an added benefit that you get to eat what you make :)