When I thought about the apple spice cake with panuche frosting that I made a couple of weeks ago, I recalled Liam actually barely ate the cake, but boy did he eat that frosting. Okay, simple flavors it will be...but that doesn't mean it has to be simple design.Awhile ago, we had a friend from our junior college days post her daughter's 1st birthday party pics that included the most beautiful 6-layer rainbow cake with white frosting. Each layer was a different color of the rainbow and there was thick white frosting between all the layers too.
Well, I decided to go for it in cuppy cake form. And, I have a mini-muffin tin from our Sunday Champagne Brunch days in college.I got a basic white cake mix and made the recipe on the box:
1 box mix
1 C. water
1/3 C. veggie oil
3 eggs
Mix with electric mixer for 2 minutes.
Then separate the cake mix evenly into 6 separate small bowls. Add food coloring. I was lucky I didn't have to mix any primaries to get secondary colors. I had 1 pack of those Schilling 4-color liquid droppers with the pointy caps (you know the ones – all our moms had them when we were growing up). But in my recent forays into more talent required types of decorating (eg. Liam's 1st birthday giraffe cake with my first attempt at fondant), I've managed to acquire a few other gel colors which are great as they don't liquify your icing and have super vibrant colors.
I used Wilton gel colors in: violet, copper orange, and sunny yellow.
I used the Schilling liquid colors for: red, blue, green.
I was a little worried that the orange was too dark. I originally bought it because it was my substitute for brown since I didn't think that was appropriate for a child's giraffe cake. But as it turned out, the red was so pale, it was almost pink and that contrasted with the dark orange quite nicely.
Start adding your separate cake mix by spoon. I used a small tea spoon (note I didn't say teaspoon) and only about half of the spoon at that.
The cake batter was full enough that it really didn't spread. Being that I was using mini-cupcake papers, I noticed I was already having trouble with fullness. So by the time I got to green, I realized throwing in a couple spoonfuls of water to thin it a little. The colors started to spread and I was chugging along.
Time for the oven. I was a little worried about the fact that my cupcake wrappers were so full because you normally only fill them 2/3 full to allow for rise. As I was using the mini pan, I shaved 4 minutes off so I'd have more time if the centers were liquid and wouldn't really risk burning them.
Oven at 350F degrees for 14 minutes. *
The timer went off, the toothpick went in and came out clean. They were super puffed over the top and running into each other, but they really had a great mushroom top (a la Mario Bros.)
Allow to cool, and then frost with white frosting for the striking contrast. I used a new product from Pillsbury that was a pre-star-tipped, canned, pressurized icing tube. It was SO easy!!! But it unfortunately did not have enough frosting for 24 mini-cupcakes (probably would have, but I have made 2 larger cupcake in our silicon pan with the leftover colored cake batter and I frosted those first, oops). Luckily I had a regular can of Pillsbury white frosting as well.
* Tip: Don't preheat your oven until you're almost done with loading up those cupcake papers. It takes forever to load those little guys with 6 different colors and I was dying in the warming kitchen! Remember, this is August in the Sacramento Valley folks. It's hot in here!
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