Molly Yeh's Rainbow Layer Cake | Girl Meets Farm | Food Network

everybody I'm Molly a from Girl Meets farm and today I'm going to show you how to make a rainbow cake and I'm going to give you all my best tips so that you can make a stunning cake right from your own home make sure that you have all of the food coloring to match the rainbow roygbiv style and then also whip up your favorite vanilla cake batter whether it's from a box or from your favorite recipe I don't care just make sure you've got eight cups of vanilla batter for this recipe make it a little bit under mixed though because once we get our food coloring in we're going to complete the mixing process and we want to take every step that we can to make sure that we don't over mix our cake batter because that could lead to a gummy cake okay so to get started I want to make sure that my cake pans are prepped first and if you'd like to use my vanilla cake recipe you can find it on the app so grab your pans get six six inch cake pans if you don't have six of them you can bake this in batches it'll still be totally fine and you can set them all out I like having everything arranged on the counter just to make it easier and cleaner and now grease all of your pans so that the cakes don't stick and then just to make sure that they don't stick to the bottom I also want you to line the bottoms of the pans with parchment paper that's been cut out so that the rounds fit perfectly in the bottoms of the pan the last thing I want to happen to you is for you to go through all of this batter mixing process and then bake the cakes and then have the cake stick to the pan that would be a disaster okay so now let's mix up the batter so grab your food coloring and I'm going to show you a way of doing it where you only have to use one spatula to mix up all six colors so grab a rubber spatula and start with the lightest color your yellow and I'm using kind of the Dijon gold color okay start with a little bit of food coloring you can always add more to get the shade that you want and then just quickly mix up your batter and again you want to be careful not to mix it more than you have to so see what I'm talking about if you would have mixed the batter fully when you mix in the food coloring you would have over mixed the batter because you really do have to mix it a lot to get the food coloring in but this way if you leave the batter a little bit under mixed you'll get a perfectly textured cake okay now I'm going to scrape my batter right into one of the pans that's been greased and lined with parchment paper and then use a small offset or the back of a spoon to spread it out evenly okay now give your spatulas a good scrape you don't have to worry about getting another spatula or fully cleaning this one off because the next color we're going to mix up is green and there's yellow and green so it all works out okay so I'm using this pretty teal color just because I love this shade you can use gel food coloring or liquid food coloring either will work I find that there are more gel coloring options available I have like probably over a hundred food colorings okay this looks good let's pour our green into the cake pan now just scrape it right in and then use your baby offset to smooth it around okay and then just again scrape off your spatulas really well no need to clean them off or get a new spatula it's okay if a little bit of the green gets into the blue okay two colors down now let's mix up the blue and I'm using sky blue here okay I think I want my blue to be a little bit darker so I'm going to add more food coloring I find that with gel food colorings they take a little bit more than the liquid food colorings as far as saturation of color this blue is looking great it's ready for the cake pan okay and I'll spread it around these are going to be thin cake layers but because there's so many of them that's what we want okay so next I'm going to use this eggplant color which is a nice dark purple you guys should get super creative with this too you don't just have to stick to the Rainbow theme you could do colors of your favorite sports teams if you're into sports or your school colors purple's all mixed just get this into my pan you could go like super 90s and make a tie-dye cake and that's just when you don't mix all the food coloring in completely next we're going to mix up the red I'm using a darker almost maroon red um this would be a great homemade birthday cake especially as a smash cake with like all the different colors around their faces truthfully I feel like my purpose in life is to make Bernie's birthday cakes I can't wait okay Red's looking great I'm gonna scrape this into my pan beautiful and just smooth this out I'm just rotating the pan and spreading it out all the way to the edge and trying to get it as even as I can but it doesn't have to be perfect because in the oven it'll even out and now the last color we're gonna mix up is our orange and I'm using a muted pumpkiny tone my best batter tip is you want to bring your ingredients to room temperature before you combine them you want to give the full three to four minutes to the butter and sugar creaming method so they get fluffy okay by now your orange should be mixed add it to your pan how gorgeous are all these colors and look at that only one spatula amazing okay now spread this out these look great they're ready to bake and again if you only have two or three six inch cake pans just bake this in batches and leave the batter covered at room temperature while you do that okay now I'm gonna transfer these to some pans and that'll just help me get them in the oven and out and try to allow some space in between them just so that they can bake evenly on all sides and now these are going to bake at 350 until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with just a few crumbs start checking them for doneness at 22 minutes [Music] [Music] these cakes look so colorful I am so pleased with how they turned out okay now it's important that the cakes cool fully before we get the frosting so just let them sit in their pants for 10 minutes and then transfer them to a wire rack so that they can cool completely and uh I think I have enough time to organize my sprinkle collection welcome to my sprinkle collection um I've got super normal nonpareils I've got rainbow chips I've got this beautiful vintage mix okay which one do you guys think that we should put on the rainbow cake Stars um you know what I'm I'm kind of feeling just like these super standard classic nonpareils and also maybe some gold that'll just liven things up I like using a mixture of different sprinkles to get different shapes and colors so I'm gonna use these nonpareils and these gold bits [Music] okay so now that your cakes are fully cooled it's time to level them so grab a bowl and also grab a long serrated knife and by leveling I just mean that we're going to saw off the top because see how it's domed we want to level it out so that the cakes Stack Up evenly grab your serrated knife and then you're just going to gently saw off that Dome going straight across and then you can rotate it a little bit to help it around and then once you have the top off just place it in your cake scrap Bowl let's go on to the green again place your non-dominant hand just gently on top of the cake horizontally and then saw with your knife and then you could rotate it gently which will help the knife go through and then once you saw it completely off you can just lift it up and then the scraps go in the snack Bowl [Music] and the reason we're leveling them is so that when we stack them up with the frosting in between they Stack Up perfectly evenly you know I can feel how moist these cakes are hmm oh somewhere from Club it definitely also helps you to use a very sharp serrated knife and one that's quite a bit longer than the diameter of the cakes themselves so many things you could do with the scraps other than just eating them straight you can make cake truffles you could put them into a milkshake you could just have them with ice cream cake scraps are the best okay now that our cakes are leveled let's stack them up and frost okay okay I've got my buttercream here and I'm using one that I've added some strawberry jam to I love that little bit of sourness that it adds you can find this frosting recipe on the app too and I've also got my rotating cake wheel so when frosting a cake it's important to have the proper tools so at the bare minimum I would say you'd want a rotating cake stand a cardboard cake wheel which you can just cut out yourself from a cardboard box or you can buy them pre-cut and I'm going to stick this down with some tape and I'm using an eight inch wheel here I want it to be a little bit bigger than the cake layers themselves and then you'll also want some offset spatulas and a bench scraper so to start frosting I think I want the purple on top so I'm going to start with red so I'll do red orange yellow green blue purple place a blob of frosting in the center of your cardboard cake board and that's going to help the first layer stick down and now Center your first layer right on and give it a press and when you stick down your cardboard cake wheel and your first layer of cake it's important to get them as centered as possible so that when you frost it's even okay oh I also like to use an ice cream scoop to ensure that I'm getting the same amount of frosting in between all the layers so I'm going to add two plops of frosting right to the center and you can use any frosting store-bought works I'm using just my go-to American buttercream it's rich and creamy and now just take your offset spatula and spread the frosting all the way to the edge and you want it to even go over the edge and you'll see why in a second I'm going kind of back and forth back and forth and just take your time with this okay so now that I've got an even layer of frosting all over the top of my first layer and you can see it's hanging over the sides now I'm going to add my second layer of cake don't forget to take off the parchment from the bottom and now I'm gonna put this face down because this bottom layer of the cake is actually easier to frost so you'll get less crumbs that way and now bend over to eye level to make sure that the layers are perfectly lined up the frosting that's smooshing out the sides eventually we're going to smooth it down it's much easier to do that than it is to try to get frosting in between the layers if we hadn't have pushed the frosting all the way out okay now I'm going to add two more scoops of frosting so frosting cakes takes a lot of practice I first learned when I was working at a bakery in town here and I would just spend my entire shift frosting cakes the thing is practice makes perfect you guys have this and I'm using my other hand here just to rotate my cake wheel to help me out to make sure that it's even all the way around okay let me get the next layer on and again I'm putting it face down and now another two scoops of frosting this is gonna be so pretty once it's cut into okay another layer frosting red orange yellow green blue [Music] [Music] and the last layer of purple or violet regime look how pretty this is check this out [Music] [Music] so now that all of my layers are on and I have a bunch of frosting swishing out the sides I'm gonna do one of these and rotate the cake as I smoosh it all down and my offset spatula is kind of staying in place all right and now that I have these holes here I can just scrape off my spatula and then scoop some back up with the end and then fill in the holes and then I'll smooth it down with a straight edge of the spatula you can get it mostly smooth with your large offset spatula but then you can use your bench Draper to fine-tune that smoothness so use one hand to turn the turntable while the other hand stays relatively in place scraping down the frosting and then you can keep on going around just lightly scraping off the top layers of the frosting so that it's smooth okay now once you have your sides where you want them to be you can work on the top and for that you can take your big offset spatula and just smooth all of this frosting down sweeping it across the top wipe off your spatula in between sweeps I love to just take the time to smooth out the frosting and get it as smooth as I possibly can on top how you doing you looking good all right when your cake is smooth it's time to decorate and go sprinkle crazy here I go [Music] and let's finish with some gold wrinkles [Music] okay this rainbow cake is a show stopper and wait until we cut into it alright so anytime you're serving a cake you want to serve it at room temperature the texture is going to be best that way let me grab a knife and I'm going to wet my knife a little bit because it helps get cleaner cuts and grab a plate and now cut straight down this is the scariest part and with these tall cakes it's especially important to make sure that the knife is going straight down and it's not tilted we're doing great I'm nervous and excited cut all the way down and then slip the knife under the bottom the moment of truth [Music] it worked yay look at this gorgeous rainbow how beautiful okay we've gotta taste this now [Music] it's almost too pretty to eat but just almost [Music] so sweet so moist and dense and that strawberry frosting is the perfect touch all right you guys with a little practice and some patience you are going to nail this rainbow cake and impress all your friends foreign [Music] foreign

Channel: Food Network

Views: 26,455

Keywords: food network, food, cooking, recipe, how-to, how to make, cook, ingredients, recipes, easy recipes, easy recipe, food network recipes, girl meets farm, Molly Yeh, Midwest cooking, farm to table, simple life, farm food, my name is yeh, comfort food, homemade, Birthday Cake, cake, Cake, birthday cake recipes, birthday party, dessert, party, birthday, Rainbow Layer Cake, Rainbow Cake, Layer Cake, cake recipes, birthday cake, cakes, how to make a rainbow cake, rainbow recipes, rainbow, eat

Id: EyXdoqqSL9Q

Length: 19min 27sec (1167 seconds)

Published: Wed May 10 2023