Rainbow Celebration Cake

A rainbow cake makes a great treat for a loved one, not many people would expect to find a rainbow cake inside the icing, and I found it made a lovely surprise. I am interested in trying various different flavourings, and also possibly making patterns within the cake, and will keep you all posted if I do. Here's how to make the basic one, it does take quite some time, so be prepared.

• Preheat your oven to gas mark 4, and grease two 7 inch cake tins.
• Take 14 oz Stork, or any softened butter, and 14 oz caster sugar. Cream together until smooth and pale.
• In a separate bowl crack 7 large eggs, make sure there are no bits of shell, whisk, and add gradually to the sugar and butter mix, beating in well. 
• Gradually fold in 14 oz. self raising flour. 
• Take a separate bowl and take some of your mix. I don't have a scientifically accurate way of making sure all your individual cakes are the same size, I just took a table spoon, and my wooden spoon and picked up a large dollop of mix, and did this three times for each cake. Of course you can just weigh out the mixture if you want to be more accurate. Add some food colouring and fold in until the whole mix is evenly coloured. Spread this coloured mix into one of the cake tins. Repeat in a separate bowl for your second colour. Put both coloured cakes in the oven for about 15-20 mins.
• I was always taught to get the cake in the oven as soon as possible after adding the eggs so I found it quite unsettling having to leave so much mix waiting while the first few baked, but as I'm sure not many people have six cake tins of the same size, and an oven big enough to bake them all in one go, I didn't have much choice. Cover your mixing bowl of mixture with cling film while you wait for them to cook. 
• Once the first of the cakes are done, leave them to cool, remove them from the tins, and repeat until all the cakes have been baked.
• Once they are all cool, make some buttercream icing by creaming softened butter and icing sugar together.
• To construct the cake, first decide what order you want the colours in. Take the base cake, cover the top with a thin layer of buttercream (I tried to keep the filling quite thin as there are so many layers, I didn't want the overriding taste to be buttercream rather than cake!). On the next cake cover the bottom with raspberry jam and place on top of the bottom layer. Continue until all layers have been added.
• I had to then wrap cling film around the outside of the cake as it was quite a tower so it didn't all slide off before the buttercream set a bit. Even if you have a large enough fridge to put the cake in it's probably worth wrapping it up to ensure it keeps its shape.
• In the meantime, sprinkle some icing sugar on your work surface and roll out your icing. When ready, unwrap the cake, cover the outside with a thin layer of buttercream so the icing sticks. and cover.
  It's up to you how you decorate it. I went for icing flowers (roll out the various colours, cut out the shapes of petals, and construct on the cake), but the options are endless.
  
  Here's a photo of the other side of mine, in case you wanted to do flowers as well and wanted some ideas.