Rainbow Cake

Does the colour of food make or break a dish? I'm quite a fan of colourful food, but only in the sense that its the ingredients that have made the colour - pink from beetroot, green from spinach, rich orange from chorizo and smoked paprika... On the other hand, the seemingly inevitable brown-ness of most of the curries I make doesn't put me off. 

I don't know if I've mentioned it before but there is a family story - part of the folklore of my father's childhood, in which he produced blue macaroni cheese when it was his turn to cook. No one could stomach it and he was henceforth relieved of cooking duties.

Pink seems to be following in her maternal grandfather (Grumpy, as he is affectionately known)'s footsteps with her love of artificially coloured food. I suppose it's all part of experimenting, perhaps even the same part of her that is currently fascinated by make up and leaves me silently weeping in Boots as I try and dissuade her from spending her pocket money on slut red lipstick with out using the words 'cheap' 'common' or 'tart' - she is only 9, after all...

Anyway, I'd rather garish food than garish lipstick any day over the week. 

And on that note, on Sunday, we made Rainbow Cake. 

Pink did most of it - it's a pretty straightforward sponge recipe but she needed help with all the faffing about dividing mixture between bowls. From the child who used to say, when invited to bake "Just call me when it's time to lick the bowl. Mummy", this interest in baking is one I do now find myself wishing to nurture (I make no secret of the fact that I used to hate cooking with the kids). In the wake of her setting to and producing a green nutella cake single-handedly a few weeks ago -

(flat and rather solid, but strangely tasty for all that it was a rather lurid colour), this was an opportunity to let her play fast and loose with the food colours. She was especially pleased with the rainbow stripes of cream cheese frosting across the top. We followed the recipe and used Squires Kitchen gel colours - my mum had bought a set and made the same cake a few months ago for some event; and as she was never going to make it again, she passed the colours on. 

The only deviation from the Good Food recipe was that we used cream cheese frosting which included butter rather than the simple cream cheese and icing sugar frosting in the original recipe - my mum had found this frosting quite slimy and the towers of cake had slid around a bit...

Anyway, it's pretty spectacular. Doesn't taste brilliant, but, hey. Fur coat and no knickers isn't always a bad thing...