The best cooking Intentions that resulted in a spectacularly long and photo filled post about an amazing technicolor dream cake and 15.5 cupcakes

Brace yourselves. This one is going to be par-TIC-U-LAR-LY long.

I need as many hugs as possible after thinking about giving away the little orange kitten. I need not to think about it so much because it's done and even though I miss her and had certainly begun to think of her as mine... I need to move on.

What better way to move on than with baked goods?

What better way to move on than with RAINBOW baked goods? With icing?

Especially when that icing can be triple fudge with chocolate chips in it.

Like I said, Brace yourself.

Last week I found this. It's a well photographed documentation of the creation of a rainbow cake with almost zero calories. The colors are vibrant and the sheer witnessing of such rainbow cheeriness inspired me to bake. I never EVER cook, so this is a pretty big deal.

I decided that Greg and I would definitely make the cake at some point over the weekend. Good plan, only instead of following that blog's detailed instructions on how to make an almost healthy-for-you cake, I decided that THIS time, we'd make the real deal and maybe NEXT time we'll make the probably-mostly-no-calories version.

Here are the ingredients:


And here's an incredibly detailed and somewhat obsessive documentation of this baking phenomenon. First, Someone has to crack the eggs:

Then, using the 6 eggs necessary, try to photo-capture a yolk mid-air.
Then Whisk.

Then Add the Other liquid ingredients (Oil and Water) and Mix those.

Then add Dry ingredients, and mix.



Then Divvy it up into 6 separate bowls.
Then start mixing the colors. I was using "gel" food coloring, which is different than anything I've ever used before. I thought I'd start out trying to be precise - but as you can see, eventually it devolved into pretty color swirls. The aim of the game is to make the batter the color you want. Don't stop mixing till you get there. First red:

Then Yellow:

Green!

Then Blue!
And Purple! (ew)
Lastly, Orange.

Yay Pretty Colors!
THEN you combine the colors in whatever order you want in the cake pan.

We wanted to make 2 cake levels to make ONE cake. We were going to go straight through the rainbow!


This is approximately when I realized I'm an idiot.

I was following the other blog's recipe except that I didn't follow the healthier ingredient stuff. She used two boxes of cake mix to create a full and beautiful cake - except she didn't add any eggs or oil or water....

I used two boxes of cake mix and I added all the proper and delicious ingredients. It took me until THIS moment to realize that that probably means If we put an ENTIRE box worth of cake mix into ONE little 9 inch pan, we'd probably have some spill over. Of course upon mentioning this to Greg, he told me he already knew that and we'd just have to put some tin foil down because it would definitely overflow. As though overflowing were acceptable. He'd just resolved to go along with my insanity without saying a word.

SO, instead of oozy messy cake suicide, we decided to do the OTHER cake pan with the other three rainbow colors, and then use that to make the cake and we'd use the excess batter for as many cupcakes as we could muster.

And even though this took some cajoling, here is Greg showing how we were too chicken to make a cake in a pan half the size of what was required:

Then we continued with pan # 2:
You know that "Imaginary food" in the movie Hook? The stuff the lost boys start a food fight with? This reminds me of that.



Then we embarked on the cupcakes. The Photo Mosaic is going to give you the impression that it was "quick" or "easy". And in fact, for me, it pretty much was. But for Greg it took forever. The measurements of the batter was not very scientific. He dipped a table spoon into the batter and the scraped off whatever stuck to the spoon. This was approximately 1/6th of the amount of ill up to 2/3rds of each cupcake cup. Intense.

While the cupcakes were being carefully orchestrated... the cakes were baking!

And THEN we baked the cupcakes!


Later that night we iced them and had some friends over. We did NOT cut into the cake, so we're going to take that with us this weekend when we go to Greg's family's cabin. However, here is the rainbowy delicious cheery goodness of the cupcakes:



The End. (for now.... muahahaha)