Rainbow Watercolour Cake

This cake was for an group of colleagues celebrating a birthday and an anniversary. The cake style is similar to this rainbow watercolour cake, but on a smaller scale (6" round). 

Watercolour Rainbow Stripes cake

After filling your cake, dirty ice it and then cover the top with the icing colour that you want (in this case, red) To get the rainbow stripes on the outside of the cake, pipe out even stripes of the coloured buttercream all the way around the cake, using a round piping nozzle. A turntable really helps you to move the cake around without having to break your line of buttercream. You can also pre-mark, with the back of a knife, how high each colour should be so that you get even stripes in the end.

pipe lines of buttercream all around the cake

Then, smoothen the cake out using the same technique that is always used to get nice smooth buttercream on a cake, just by using a cake scraper and scraping off the excess buttercream. 3 to 5 rounds should get you to a nice and smooth point. Too bad the excess buttercream in this technique is "wasted" because once all the colours are mixed together, you'll just end up with brown buttercream. 

scrape off the excess to smoothen the surface

When you're happy with the smoothness of the sides, finish smoothing off the top by gently drawing the excess buttercream into the middle of the cake with an offset spatula. 

there we go, nice and smooth

The lettering was made out of fondant, using FMM tappits. Tappits are a nightmare to work with. It's so very frustrating to "tap tap tap" the darned Tappit against the counter in an attempt to get the fondant out. I've hit it on the counter so hard that my capital letter A-J Tappit has busted into three pieces!!! The "trick" is to roll out your fondant so that it's paper thin and you can see through it, then let it sit there to dry out for a good 10 - 15 mins before cutting out the letters. But, I'm really impatient and often in a hurry, so I try to cut the letters out after freshly rolling the fondant. Well, with the amount of time I spend banging out the letters and picking out ruined ones out of the Tappit with a toothpick, I might as well just have waited for it to dry out a little first. 

add fondant letters

Anyway, you'll scoff if I told you that it took me an almost hour to cut out the letters for "happy anniversary & birthday", but it seriously seemed like that's how long it took. 

After putting the buttercream on the cake, I like to chill it in the fridge 'til it's nice and solid before putting the fondant letters on. You gotta work quickly to put the letters on once the cake is removed from the fridge, before the condensation coats the surface of the cake, or else the letters will slide off. I wish i had marked out where to place the letters so that they would be more centred. 

pic from the happy cake eaters

Glad that everyone enjoyed this decadent rainbow buttercream-striped Devil's food cake filled with whipped dark chocolate ganache. Happy Birthday & Anniversary!