An actual savoury recipe! Who knew I could still do those? Actually, I have an uneasy feeling I’ve done something very like this before. I mean, me, pasta, vegetables – that’s basically my default work night dinner, frankly.
But I think this is a little different to my last primavera, primarily because I’ve gotten a lot lazier since then. Also, someone told me that adding some pasta cooking water to one’s pasta sauce makes it come together better, and they are quite right, so if nothing else, this recipe has that particular upgrade! (I’m still hopeless at remembering to salt my pasta water, however…)
This is a pea-free primavera, because Andrew doesn’t like peas. It is also a broad-bean-free primavera, because shelling broadbeans is for people who are much less lazy than me. Besides, Woollies had pea ravioli with spinach and feta, so I figured our pea requirements were covered.
And that’s about it. It’s a simple, tasty meal for four, and a good celebration of spring.
Your shopping list
Olive oil
1 bunch baby carrots
2 golden shallots (the French ones that look like miniature onions)
2 bunches asparagus
200g cherry tomatoes
60 g baby spinach
2 tablespoons pesto
100 g ricotta
50 g parmesan, finely grated
650 g vegetable ravioli (I used the aforementioned pea ravioli and a sweet potato one. But any light-tasting vegetable ravioli will do.)
a ladle or two of reserved cooking water Continue reading →
I know. I know. This is a completely ridiculous recipe to share because it’s basically all obscure ingredients. And do you want to know how it came about? It came about because we had a bake sale to fundraise for my Relay for Life team, and I’d made vegan cupcakes, and blueberry-lemon cupcakes with berry mousse (leftover from the Tentacle Cake), but I didn’t have anything gluten free in the mix. And I have a lot of people at work who need gluten-free goodies. So I decided to make one of my many trusty almond biscuit recipes, and thought, what do I have in my pantry?
And the answer was Davidson plum powder and Ruby chocolate. Among other things. So… this is technically a Pantry Special – but only if your pantry is full of *really* random things that you bought at farmers markets and specialty shops and then forgot to use.
On the other hand, if your pantry *is* full of such things, this is actually a pretty good recipe. It’s not too sweet, it’s nicely acidic, and it’s gluten-free (and the only dairy is in the ganache, so if you are someone who can handle a little bit of dairy but not much, you can probably cope with this). And it’s super fast to make!
Also, you get to feel like a super pretentious version of Arabella Weir and Richard E Grant on Posh Nosh when people ask you what flavour your biscuits are. ‘We took a gracious handful Ruby chocolate from the very first shipment to reach Australia, and gently seduced it into a menage-à-deux with the cream. Then we added some Davidson plum powder. It’s acidic and a little bit demanding, and but it condoles perfectly with the almonds in the biscuits…’
Apologies again for the lack of pictures. I was baking a lot of things in a hurry and forgot to pay attention to the photography side of things. To make up for it, if you scroll down, I’ll tell you how to make a ‘lava lamp’ from kitchen ingredients. Accompanied by a terrible photo, if I do say so myself.
Your shopping list
200g almond meal
50 g sugar
10 g Davidson plum powder
1 egg
40 ml cream
120 g ruby chocolate
Now what will you do with it?
Preheat your oven to 170°C, and line a baking tray with baking paper.
Combine the almond meal, sugar and Davidson plum powder in a bowl, then mix in the egg until you have a nice dough.
Roll into small balls – walnut sized, or thereabouts – and place on the tray, then flatten slightly.
Bake for 15 minutes or so, or until just getting golden brown underneath.
Now chop the ruby chocolate (or if you have it in tiny pellets, it will be fine as is), and put into a heatproof bowl. Bring the cream to the boil, and pour over the chocolate. Cover the bowl for 30 seconds to speed the meltiness, then stir until you have a smooth mixture.
Dollop the ganache onto each biscuit, and top with a few little purple edible glitter stars, if you have them. Because why not?
Variations
Well, freeze-dried raspberry powder would work in a pinch. You want something acidic but dry, so that the biscuit keeps the same texture. Passionfruit powder might also work, but I’m not quite sure how that would mix with the ruby ganache.
As for dietary requirements, this biscuit is gluten-free and low-fructose, but full of nuts and rather dependent on the egg. The dairy is only in the ganache – you could replace the cream with soy milk, but the only variety of Ruby chocolate currently available on the market contains milk powder, so if you are strictly non-dairy, you are going to be out of luck.
Random Science Experiment – Lava Lamp edition!
So, this made a lot of us happy at about 2 in the morning when we were trying to stay awake. It was me, and one of the animal techs, and her non-scientist friend, and then we started demonstrating this for the Cancer Council volunteers and the teams next door to us.
So what I’m saying is, the picture may be crappy, and the experiment may sound really basic, but it’s more spectacular than you might think. Especially at 2 am.
Your shopping list
Vegetable oil
Water
Food colouring
Alka seltzer
Extremely Scientific Method
Put a little water in the bottom of a glass jar and mix it with the food colouring. Pour in vegetable oil to nearly the top.
Crumble an alka seltzer tablet into the jar.
It will start off just fizzing, but after 30 seconds or so, big, coloured bubbles will start floating down from the top. It’s pretty awesome.
Also, when it stops, you can add more alka seltzer to get it started again. After four or five times, it stops working so well, probably because the concentrations are off. But it was great while it lasted!
Just when I was thinking about what sort of cake to make for my niece’s birthday, my friend in Germany sent me this photo of a Very Hungry Caterpillar cake. Now, that is a spectacular cake, but I don’t really love decorating with fondant – and also, frankly, I’m nowhere near good enough at it to make anything that pretty.
On the other hand, it did make me think about caterpillar shapes and whether a very hungry caterpillar might fit nicely on a cake shaped like a 3. After all, he is an arch-plus-a-bit, once you count his head, and a 3 has two arches. I figured I could decorate the rest of the arch with the three plums he ate on Wednesday.
My niece is both fascinated by the idea of birthday cake and a VERY picky eater. She likes banana cake, but if it doesn’t look like banana cake, she might not be willing to eat it, because you just never know. Also, banana cake must be banana and nothing else. No rogue pineapples or dates or anything like that are allowed.
So I found a very plain banana cake recipe, and used it to make one ring cake and the little cakes. Since I needed chocolate cake crumbs for my brother’s cake, I made the other ring cake a chocolate cake, but for the purpose of this recipe, I’m going to recommend making a double batch of the banana cake. It’s easier, and you don’t have to worry about the icing tasting odd with one of the cakes.
A few notes. You will need two 20 cm ring tins (or one ring tin, which you wash in between, which is what I did) for the 3, a miniature madeleine tin (about 3x5cm for each cake) for the plums, a big friand tin for the head, and a gem scone tin (like a patty tin, but all the indentations are round rather than pie-shaped) for the body. Or rummage through your cupboard and find something roughly the right size, and use tin foil to make it closer to the shape you want. That’s what I did with the friand tin.
Unless you have a very large oven, I suggest you halve the recipe below, and make the cakes in two batches. I’ve provided the full shopping list below, with the halved amounts next to them for those who don’t like mental arithmatic.
You will also want food colouring pastes if possible – they give a good strong colour without having to use enormous amounts, which is what you want.
Every year, I organise a team of colleagues to do the Global Challenge, a pedometer-based challenge where you have to get a certain number of steps per day. My team of seven has changed every year, but there are three people who have been in it every time, and more who have taken a year or two off and come back. This year, we have my three regulars, someone who is back from last year, someone who is back from four years ago, and two newbies.
During the Global Challenge, there are certain weekends where we have ‘mini-challenges’, that encourage us to beat our personal best, or reach some arbitrary number of steps as a group, etc. Traditionally, I try to organise long walks for these challenges – we’ve walked from Black Rock to Saint Kilda, up along Merri Creek to Fawkner for doughnuts, from Parkville to Williamstown to go on a ghost tour, from Brunswick to the CBD to go on a chocolate walk, and all the way from the mouth of the Moonee Ponds river up to Pascoe Vale, where we got caught in a thunderstorm.
I was looking for some activities for us this year, and after getting a hard no on my belly-dancing plans, and establishing that several of our walkers couldn’t do really long walks this year for health reasons, I started looking around for more sensible options. Which is when I spotted the ad for the Cancer Council Relay for Life… which just happened to fall on one of our challenge weekends.
This is a 24-hour relay to raise money for the Cancer Council, but it’s also about remembering people lost to cancer, and it has a fair bit of symbolism attached, in that nobody walks for 24 hours straight, but teams try to have someone on the track at all times. If one person can’t continue, someone else will carry on for them.
I suggested this, only half-seriously to my lot. (Fine. You don’t want belly-dancing. How about a 24-hour relay, then?) They were in. And I mean, IN. I was… appalled. But also the team captain, so I got us signed up, and went recruiting for more team members. My feeling was that we wanted two people rostered on at all times, in case someone needed a break, and ideally, I wanted the shifts to be offset so that someone was always fresh. Fortunately, I was able to recruit 13 people, with two more joining us on the day, which meant that we each did two 2-hour shifts, and most people stayed on a bit before or after their shifts to help out.
Teams are encouraged to have costumes, themes, etc. I was still recovering from the conference I’d just finished organising, so I was pretty much planning to just make sure people showed up and leave it at that, but I organised a bake sale to fundraise, and during the bake sale, our team plan evolved. We would wear lab coats! We would Engage With The Community! We would have a science fair booth, with experiments that people could participate in! We have a purple and yellow dragon onesie which is the same colours as the Cancer Council’s logo!
And we did.
I have to say, the day was a lot more fun than I had expected (I had not expected it to be any fun at all – I have dodgy knees which were playing up that week, so I knew it was going to be painful, and that’s about all I knew). Cancer Council was delighted to have medical researchers participating. The other participants – especially the children! – were delighted by our activities. There was a silent disco overnight, which was hilarious to watch – between the people singing along and the people dancing to music only they could hear as they went around the track, it was quite something. The lab coats turned out to be both warm and highly visible. We realised early that we wouldn’t be winning the 4x100m sprint activity, so we turned it into a onesie costume relay with the costume having to be worn by each successive participant – and lost convincingly, dramatically, hilariously, and to sustained commentary from the organisers, who found the whole thing hysterical.
Me, pretending to be a scientist. You should see me pipetting!
There were also some serious moments – the carers and survivors lap at the start, and the candlelight ceremony in the evening, which remembered people who were fighting cancer and people who had passed away from cancer recently. It was very moving.
And I was very proud that, while other teams slowly shrank in size over the course of the event (I felt bad for one team where almost everyone went home at 9pm, leaving three people to carry the subsequent 13 and a half hours alone), my team mates all turned up on time, full of energy and enthusiasm, and walked, ran or danced their shifts, no matter what hour of the day or night.
You probably didn’t come here for an extended report on Relay for Life, and I promise that the recipe is coming up next. But while you are here… if you are currently feeling inclined to support a really good cancer charity in Australia, I’d love it if you’d sponsor me. Or my team, who really were fantastic.
My awesome team, who totally deserve your sponsorship
And now for the recipe! Which is linked, tenuously, to this post by the fact that I invented it for our fundraising morning tea.
This was a bit of a pantry special – I needed something for the people who couldn’t eat lactose or fructose or gluten (of which I have quite a few at work), and I needed something that was quick and wouldn’t require me to go to the shops. I had half a packed of crushed walnuts and half a packet of cashews. I had cocoa, and cinnamon. And I had leftover vegan chocolate ganache from making Sachertorte cupcakes.
So that was easy. This is basically my almond biscuit recipe in yet another iteration, but I found that without almonds, it made a pretty sticky, sloppy dough, so I added some rice flour to help hold it together. I did find that I needed slightly damp hands to shape it, even so. But the results were really delicious, so it was worth the minor hassle.
Very few pictures, I’m afraid – I was too busy trying to make the biscuits in time after a very long day at work – but if you scroll down to the bottom I *will* tell you how to make a rainbow carnation.
Your shopping list
100 g walnuts (crushed is fine, you will be pulverising them anyway)
100g cashews (ditto)
50 g cocoa
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
75 g caster sugar
1 egg
1-2 tbsp rice flour, if needed
1/4 cup soy milk
125 g Lindt 70% chocolate
30 ml maple syrup Continue reading →
A while back, one of my Professors welcomed me back from long service leave with a copy of Deceptive Desserts: A Lady’s Guide to Baking Bad, by Christine McConnell. I was particularly taken by her recipe for Screamberries, and my brother and I originally had evil plans to make this as a birthday cake for Elisabeth’s first birthday (just think of the photos!), but for some reason (possibly because my mother was appalled?) we decided to make the orange and banana cakes instead.
Well, this year, what with one thing and another, it became practical to have my brother’s birthday party and my niece’s both on the same day. Obviously, this necessitated two cakes, and when I asked my brother what he wanted for this cake, the answer was ‘tentacles’.
So that was easy, then.
I made a few modifications to McConnell’s recipe. Vanilla mousse seemed boring, so I filled the waffle cups half with vegan chocolate mousse and half with berry mousse. Stabilised whipped cream seemed like way too much like hard work for a relatively small result, so I didn’t do that. And my first batch of waffle cones weren’t great, so I had to make another double batch in the hour between getting back from cantoring in Middle Park and leaving for birthday shenanigans in Canterbury. So I signally failed to follow the instructions and just dumped everything in together. I can’t claim that they were brilliant waffle cups, but they were fresh and they did the job.
And really, who cared about the waffle cups? The mousse was delicious, and really, we were all here for the strawberries and the tentacles, right?
Incidentally, you can make this recipe in advance and take the components in separate boxes to wherever you are going, at which point it takes about ten minutes to put together.
Why yes, this is indeed another Wedding Cake Leftovers post. Is anyone really surprised by this? This time, the cake bits in question were the vegan sachertorte cakes. I also had leftover dark chocolate, leftover milk and leftover cream – which is why these cake pops didn’t turn out vegan. But there is no reason why yours shouldn’t be! I was really just trying to avoid wasting ingredients, and decided that on this occasion, that was more important than feeding my vegan scientists. I’ll make something for them next time, don’t worry.
This is another super easy recipe, but I’m really pleased with how it turned out – the cake pops really taste like chocolate truffles, but they are much easier to make, because the cake crumbs make them a bit less sticky than pure ganache, and a lot more inclined to roll into nice, neat balls.
Because I had what seemed like acres of chocolate cake crumbs, I wound up dividing my mixture in two and flavouring half of it with freeze dried raspberry powder that I had discovered in my freezer, and the other half with six little peppermint candy sticks leftover from Christmas, which I found in my pantry. So despite being an extremely decadent, rich, fudgy chocolate truffle recipe, this also counts as an extremely frugal recipe!!!
Yeah, that’s not so convincing, is it?
But it is quite a good pantry-and-fridge-clearing recipe, which counts for something, I think.
You probably thought I was done with rainbow-wedding-cake related posts, didn’t you? Nope. Not a chance. I’m actually writing this a month before you are reading it (and a good thing, too, because right at this very moment I am almost certainly collapsed into an incoherent heap after running a conference all week) and if I dared look into my fridge right now, I would see, in addition to these cake pops, a large box full of chocolate cake crumbs, a big ball of white chocolate ganache the size of my clasped hands, a bowl of lavender whipped ganache, and half a carton of cream – ooh, and I’ve just realised what I should make next, but I’m not going to tell you what that is because that would be cheating.
In short, you would not believe how many leftovers that wedding cake generated, so having spent the last few Sundays reviewing the individual cake recipes, we are now starting on the Leftovers Chronicles.
(And yes,I’m milking this for as long as I can, because I do want to start blogging regularly again… but I don’t trust this current burst of energy and ideas to last, so I want to try to blog well ahead of time while I can so that if it all goes to hell for a month or two, there won’t be such a long gap between posts…)
Anyway, cake pops. Cake pops are traditionally made from cake crumbs and icing mixed together and dipped in chocolate or candy melts. I usually find them horrifically sweet, to be honest. But I also didn’t have many other ideas for what to do with epic amounts of cake off-cuts. So I thought I’d see what happened if I mixed them with the lemon curd that I also had leftover, and the results were actually pretty good, and not too sweet at all.
As for the ruby chocolate… yes, of course I pre-ordered some from the first shipment in Australia. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s quite an interesting taste – I think it’s like white chocolate, but with an acidic bite to it. It is not, to be honest, my favourite kind of chocolate, but it does go very well with lemon, which most other kinds of chocolate do not. If you can’t get your hands on ruby chocolate – which is not cheap, in any case – white chocolate would work just fine, but the overall result would just be a little sweeter.
Calling these cupcakes Sacher-cupcakes is probably an insult to Austrians everywhere and they will never let me go back to their country, let alone that hotel, but I do think it’s a fair description.
Sachertorte is a light chocolate sponge covered with apricot jam and chocolate glaze. These cakes are also light and chocolatey, filled with apricot jam and covered with chocolate ganache, and they are really delicious. I’ve made this recipe quite a few times in the last year or two for work events, because it’s incredibly easy and fast to make, works with gluten-free flour mix if it needs to, and once you fill it with apricot jam and load it with ganache nobody will believe that it’s vegan.
These are really quite basic cupcakes with a little bit of lavender in them. If you’ve ever made a plain butter cake, you probably used this recipe, but without the lavender. The only slightly complex part is the whipped ganache, which is a bit fiddly, but actually very easy. Once you’ve made the ganache once, you’ll probably want to make it again, because it gives you a delicately flavoured cream that holds up much better than whipped cream if it needs to sit around for a few hours.
The only thing to remember is that you need to start the ganache at least 7 hours before you plan to serve the cupcakes. Making it the day before is fine.
Also, I just love the flavour of lavender, but usually I make it either too strong or not strong enough. For me, this whipped ganache is in the magical Goldilocks zone – noticeably lavender, without making you think about soap…
Your shopping list
75 white chocolate
125 + 160g cream, both chilled
3 blackberries, crushed
1 tsp dried culinary lavender + 2 tsp for the cake
12g liquid glucose (yes, I know, I know. This recipe is usually made in a much larger batch. This is about 1 1/2 teaspoons, I think. Just think how much worse it would be if I’d only made a dozen cupcakes!)
250g butter, softened
300 g caster sugar
4 eggs
370 g self-raising flour
160 ml milk
500g blackberry jam
Now what will you do with it?
First, make the ganache. Chop up the white chocolate and put it into a bowl.
Put 125g cream in a small saucepan with the blackberries and 1 tsp of lavender, and heat until boiling point. Switch off the heat and leave for five minutes.
Pour the cream through a seive into another bowl. Press the blackberries into the seive with the fork to make sure their juice comes through. Return the cream to the saucepan.
Add the liquid glucose, which is, yes, a pain to use, but it does somehow make the ganache more stable. What I recommend doing is rinsing a teaspoon and your hands in cold water, then using the teaspoon to scoop out the glucose and your finger to push it off into the cream – the cold water makes the glucose stick less. And I’m sorry about the quantities. This is the halved version of the recipe, and even with 24 cupcakes, you are going to have more than you need…
Bring the cream and glucose back to the boil, and pour the mixture over the white chocolate in the bowl. Stir until the chocolate melts. If you’ve made ganache before, you are probably worried about these ratios, because this is a very thin ganache and about to get thinner. Don’t worry – think of this as whipped cream thickened with chocolate, and it will make more sense.
Stir in the rest of the chilled cream. You might add a drop of purple colouring to the mixture to make it more inviting if you like, but this is optional. Cover the ganache with clingwrap, which should be directly on the surface of the cream, and refrigerate for at least six hours or up to two days.
When you are ready to make the cupcakes, preheat your oven to 180°C, and line two twelve-hole muffin tins with paper cases. (Or do this in two batches, one tin at a time.)
Grind the lavender in a mortar and pestle (you can grind it with some of the sugar if you find this easier) until it is somewhat broken down.
Put the lavender into a medium-sized mixing bowl with the butter and sugar, and cream together. Add the eggs one at a time, then mix in the flour and milk, alternately.
Divide the mixture between the muffin tins, and put into the oven. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the cakes feel soft and springy when you poke at them gently. You might want to swap the trays around at the 15 or 20 minute mark, depending on how they are doing.
Remove from their tins, and let cool on a rack. Get out your ganache, and whip it as you would cream. The ganache has a higher fat content than cream, though, so it will whip up much faster – don’t put on a stand mixer and wander off to hang out the washing or something, this is probably only going to take a couple of minutes.
Use a small knife to cut a conical circle (I’m sure that is terrible geometry, but the right words escape me) in the middle of each cake – basically, you want a nice, round, section of cake, slightly pointed in the middle, which you are going to cut in half to make the butterfly wings, so don’t eat it!
Place a small spoonful of blackberry jam in the centre of each hole, and pipe or spoon the lavender ganache over the top of it.
Gently place the two ‘wings’ into the cream, pushing slightly inward as you do, to help raise the cream.
Dust with icing sugar or little purple stars.
Feed to the people you love.
Variations
Well, there’s no reason this has to be a lavender cake, I suppose, but isn’t that rather a waste? You might make the cakes with raspberry jam and a little rosewater in the ganache (add half a teaspoon with the cold cream, then taste and see if you need a little more), in which case I’d keep the cakes plain vanilla, because it is far too easy to wind up with overly-perfumed rose cakes.
You could replace 50 grams of the flour with cocoa, and then fill the cakes with cherry jam and add kirsch to your ganache. Apparently, I’ve decided that black forest is the variation I want for every cupcake I’m doing. Or just go ultra-chocolate – I bet this would be amazing with dark chocolate whipped ganache and a caramel filling, or a raspberry one, or maybe you could add peppermint essence to your whipped chocolate ganache, and have a choc-mint cupcake. At which point you should probably decorate it with shards of Peppermint Crisp, because that is the law.
In terms of dietary requirements, I don’t think you are going to be able to avoid dairy here, but if you have a good, basic vegan vanilla cupcake recipe you could certainly make this ensemble eggless. It is obviously free of nuts. It would work just fine with my gluten-free self-raising flour mix, and the result should also be low in fructose, though certainly not in lactose.
So, judging by the reaction I’ve had every time I’ve shown anyone any photos of this cake, this is probably the first recipe I ought to be sharing. Because, let’s face it, that was one spectacular-looking cake.
It’s also a lot easier than it looks. Seriously, if you can make a passable marble cake, and have access to good-quality food colouring, you can make this.
I actually found the prototype for this recipe online, and I’ll share the YouTube video below, because I didn’t actually take photos of the various steps, being as I was engaged in just trying to get the thing to work.
I changed a handful of things for this recipe. For one thing, I made it gluten-free, using a modified version of my gluten-free flour mix. For another, I decided to flavour it with orange flower water instead of vanilla. Using orange blossoms in the bouquet or bridal wreath is a very old bridal tradition, and I thought it would be nice to give a nod to that, especially given how interested one of the brides had been in my use of rosewater and lavender in cupcakes. I kept the flavour pretty subtle, because too much orange flower water can be very much like eating soap.
But you know what was the big thing I did that changed this cake into a proper rainbow cake?
I baked it in a smaller tin.
That’s it.
And the smaller tin meant that the arch of the rainbow was raised, giving a much more impressive rainbow effect than it might otherwise have had.
I’m going to suggest two different decorating ideas for this – the one I used in my practice run, and the one I used for the actual wedding cake. It really depends how formal you are feeling…
Your shopping list
150g butter
160g sugar
3 eggs
270g gluten-free flour mix
3 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
120g yoghurt
60g milk
1 tsp orange flower water
red, yellow, green, blue and purple food colouring pastes (these are far more vibrant than liquid food colouring)
200g white chocolate
65 ml cream
500g white icing OR lots of hundreds and thousands
You will also need a 5 inch (12.5cm) round tin with tall sides.
Now what will you do with it?
Grease the tin with butter, and line the bottom and the sides. You really don’t want all your good work to come to nothing when you turn the cake out! Preheat oven to 170°C.
(Also, you need to know now that you are not going to use all this mixture in a cake tin this size. You need somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4. You can make the rest into really psychedelic cupcakes, if you want.)
Cream the butter and the sugar, then beat in the eggs one by one.
Beat in the dry ingredients, then the yoghurt and the milk. Mix in half a teaspoon of orange flower water, and taste to see if it’s strong enough. Add the other half teaspoon if you think it needs more (I’ve found that some brands are stronger than others).
Divide the mixture between six bowls, and colour them red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. Orange requires only a tiny amount of red compared to yellow, and I strongly recommend that you buy a purple colour if you can – you can never get a really vibrant purple from red and blue colour.
Make sure the mixture is super-bright. Now is not the time to worry about the chemicals in food colouring – you don’t want a pastel rainbow, and baking will bleach the cake slightly.
Now for the fun bit! Get a big dollop of the red mixture – about 2/3 – 3/4 of what’s in the bowl, and plop it carefully into the middle of the tin. Bang the tin really hard on the bench to make the red mixture spread out a bit. It won’t go all the way to the edges yet, and that’s fine.
Get a similarly sized dollop of the orange, and plop it carefully into the very centre of the tin on top of the red. Bash the tin on the bench again – the orange will spread out with the red spreading out further under it, so you have concentric circles. Well, circle-ish things.
If this is confusing, have a look at the video below. This is where I got the recipe from – so thank you Emma, for this fantastic method.
Dollop the yellow on top of the orange, and repeat the banging bit, then do the same with the green, then the blue, then the purple.
If you are miraculously good at this, you should be able to see a little bit of red, a little bit of orange, a little bit of yellow, a little bit of green and a little bit of blue, all in concentric circles under the purple. I wasn’t that good, but it still worked pretty well.
If you are about 2/3 of the way up the tin, you can stop here. If it’s only half full, go for a double rainbow. The next layers will be a bit smaller, but that’s OK.
Put the tin in the oven, and bake for about 45 minutes to an hour. If, after 45 minutes, it’s browning too fast but still wet in the middle, reduce the temperature to 165. It will bake eventually, I promise, but deep cakes are a bit tricky. This one should pass the skewer test when it’s done.
Turn the cake out onto a wire rack to cool.
Once the cake is cool, your next step is to make the cake nice and flat on top, because you want to serve this cake upside down from where it was in the tin, so that you have a rainbow rather than a series of colourful smiles. I have no tips for this. My cakes almost always turn out looking drunk. I fluked the wedding cake, and it was still a tiny bit crooked, frankly. Just do your best.
My practice cake looked very drunk, but nobody cared once I covered it in sprinkles.
Now you are going to cover the cake in ganache and then either white icing, or sprinkles.
To make the ganache, chop the white chocolate finely and put it into a bowl.
Bring the cream to a boil, and pour over the ganache. Cover the bowl with a lid for a minute or so, to start the chocolate melting, then stir the mixture until it is smooth. Use a spatula to coat the cake thinly in ganache.
If you are looking for a nice, formal cake, you want the white icing. Sprinkle your work surface with icing sugar, and knead the icing firmly until it is soft enough to work into a smooth ball.
Use a rolling pin to roll it out. It wants to stick to the surface, so what you do is this. First, sprinkle more icing sugar on the work surface, and roll the rolling pin over the ball twice, away from you, so that you have an oval. Pick it up, and turn it over, and then rotate it 90 degrees and roll the rolling pin over it twice more. Turn it over and rotate it again, and keep going until the icing is about 3-5 mm thick, and big enough to cover the cake with several centimetres to spare on each side. So about 35cm diameter, maybe? The reason you are turning it over constantly, by the way, is that this helps the icing not to stick to the work surface, so don’t forget to do that bit.
Now you need to drape it over the cake. This is a pain, and the trick is not to stretch it. Pick it up carefully and place it gently over the top of the cake. Use a spatula or smoother (or your hand…) to smooth down the top of the cake only.
Now smooth the cake down the sides with downward strokes, a little at a time. If you are about to get wrinkles, gently pull the bottom of the icing outward, being careful not to stretch it, while you smooth down the side from top to bottom. If you are lucky, this will result in no lumps or wrinkles. I strongly suggest watching some YouTube videos (look up ‘covering a cake with fondant’) until you think you can replicate the method. That’s what I did…
If this sounds like way too much faffing around, go with the sprinkle topping instead!
To do this, cover the cake with ganache again, but this time, get out a big metal skewer and skewer the cake from bottom to top.
Make a layer of 100s and 1000s or other coloured sprinkles on a long, flat tray or your working surface, and use the skewer to place the cake on its side at one end of the sprinkles. Carefully push the skewer all the way through the cake, and use it to roll the cake along the layer of sprinkles until it is completely coated.
Now draw back the skewer a little, and use it to lever up the cake and place it face down into the sprinkles (or alternatively, get the cake back onto a cake plate, and leave the top white, or cover it with sprinkles by the more traditional, sprinkling method).
Carefully lever the cake up onto a cake plate.
Serve to someone who needs more colour in their life!
Variations
This is a gluten-free cake, obviously, and it is also low in fructose, and nut-free. You could probably make a vegan version – just start with a vegan cake recipe that has a fairly wet, but not liquid, consistency. You don’t want something that is too pancake-batterish, but you don’t want something really stiff, either. I’m sorry – I don’t have any recommendations for this one.
If you just need it to be gluten and dairy free, you can, of course, use a good dairy-free margarine like Nuttelex, and a soy or coconut milk and yoghurt.
I’m sure you could use natural food colours for this, but I think you’d have to work hard to stop your rainbow from being too pastel – though that could be pretty, too, in the right circumstances.
Welcome to my online table! My name is Catherine and I love feeding people. By day, I am a scientific co-ordinator in a medical research institute. By night - or by weekend - I am generally found cooking like a maniac, rejoicing in farmers' markets, or talking endlessly about food.
While I am an omnivore, the vast majority of recipes on this blog are vegetarian, and many more are vegan, gluten-free or allergy friendly. You can find them through the menus above, or click on What if there isn't enough food? to learn more about this blog.
