Strawberry Rainbow Cake

For a little guy who's turning two, is a special 7-layer strawberry rainbow cake! This cake is packed full of strawberries... 1.5 lbs of it, to be exact! There's strawberry in the cake batter, strawberry in the filling and of course, fresh strawberries on top of the cake. Even the birthday boy's name is made out of strawberries!

I was struggling to decide whether to dye the 7th layer a pinkish purple or a sky blue or something. As we know, the colours of the rainbow are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo & violet, but what is "indigo" really? A Google search yielded a sort of dark, midnight-ish blue of sorts...I just went with lighter purple. Doesn't have to be technically correct right? 

ROY G BIV Rainbow Cake Layers

I was a little concerned that the colours may not be "true" since the base strawberry cake batter is naturally pink from the strawberries in it. But it only took maybe half a baby spoonful of gel food colouring to get nice bright colours (yes, I actually used my baby's feeding spoon to scoop the dye. It's made of silicone and fits nicely into the little jar of colouring. Don't worry I washed thoroughly!)

7 colourful layers of strawberry cake were filled with 6 layers of strawberry Swiss meringue buttercream. This buttercream tastes like strawberry ice cream. I was very tempted to eat it by the spoonful...

buttercream petals with a rainbow hint of the surprise inside

To decorate, I decided to try the "buttercream petal" method, which is simply piping circles of buttercream in vertical lines and then pressing it down gently with an off-set spatula and dragging the frosting to the right. I wanted to incorporate some colour into the finished look to hint at the rainbow surprise inside, so I added 3 sections that had red, yellow, green and blue "petals" instead of just white. 

To finish the top of the cake, I sliced up some strawberries and arranged them in a circle around the perimeter, to make a strawberry "sun". And to do something different, instead of just piping the birthday boy's name out using buttercream after the "Happy Birthday", I cut the letter out of strawberries! Worked out pretty well, except of course, it generated leftover strawberry bits (which promptly ended up in my tummy!) A little bit of apricot glaze on the strawberries and here's the finished cake:

Happy 2nd Birthday, Jian Kai!

I won't have a picture of how this cake looks from the inside until the birthday boy cuts it, so stay tuned for an update :)