Naked Rainbow Chinese Fruit Cake

For a lady's 61st birthday, I wanted to do a different take on a traditional "Chinese Fruit Cake". Typical elements of an old school Chinese Fruit Cake: sponge cake, fresh cream & lots of fruit, oh, and everything mustn't be too sweet. 

Naked Rainbow Chinese Fruit Cake

To shake things up, I decided to do rainbow sponge cake layers, adding a drop of gel food colouring from the Americolor electric series so it would be light pastel colours. Vibrant rainbow colours are more for 1st birthdays and kids parties. I didn't want the birthday lady getting put off from too bright colours in the cake! 

pastel rainbow rainbow sponge cake layers

The 6-layer cake was already measuring over 5" inches tall without any filling, so I knew that this guy wasn't gonna fit in a cake box. I really need to get my hands on those nice tall cake boxes. Haven't found a local supplier for these yet. If any of you can recommend someone, please share the info!

naked cake layers

Since it was a rainbow cake, I wanted to do something fun and fill each layer with a different kind of fruit, taking inspiration from Thirsty for Tea. I used canned lychees, fresh mangoes, fresh kiwis and fresh strawberries for the filling, together with fresh whipped cream, flavoured with a little vanilla essence. I wanted to put canned peaches in there as well, but I totally forgot to buy a can. (and I forgot to take a pic of the kiwi layer...)

sweet & floral lychees

ripe fresh mangoes

The cake just got taller and taller with every layer! For the last layer of fruit, I used fresh strawberries. I made sure to wash, dry and cut them, and let them sit in the fridge on some paper towel to absorb the excess juices for at least 4 hours, so that they wouldn't stain the whipped cream. 

sweet fresh strawberries

Instead of covering the sides with more whipped cream, I wanted to showcase the rainbow layers, so I left it as a naked cake. Of course, this meant that I had to be a bit more careful when it came to properly damming and filling the cake so that the cream wouldn't smoosh out the sides and mess up the "clean" sponge layers after everything was assembled. It's tougher to neatly trim a round cake to have neat naked edges than it is a square or rectangular cake. 

lazy drip sytle

To decorate, I went with the lazy drip style, using some dark chocolate ganache (1:1 ratio of cream to dark chocolate by weight). I wanted to highlight the fruits that were used in the filling, so I sliced some up and arranged them on top of the cake, before the ganache fully set. I threw in a few macarons for fun and colour.

fruits to showcase the cake's filling

yummy fruits & chocolate

In hindsight, I wish I had properly drained and dried the lychees from the syrup before placing them on top of the cake, because the syrup began to pool beneath the lychee and make a weird lighter brown, which I couldn't sop up with the corner of a paper towel no matter how hard a tried! 

drippy chocolate

Since this cake was over 7" tall (thanks to that round juicy slice of kiwi on top), I had to improvise the box. The lid obviously wouldn't be able to close, so I turned to good old saran wrap (cling film) and covered the exposed parts to keep them safe and clean during transport. 

cling film to the rescue!

view from the box's window

I'm glad that the cake was a hit and that the birthday mum was very happy with her non-traditional, traditional Chinese Fruit cake! The pics below were shared by her daughter. I love the pic showing the cross-section of the cake, with all the lovely, colourful fruits! 

Naked Rainbow Chinese Fruit Cake

colourful fruity layers!