Avoid This One Mistake Before Making a Rainbow Cake

It’s all about the color wheel.

June 11, 2020

Photo by: Chantell Quernemoen | Brett Quernemoen

Chantell Quernemoen | Brett Quernemoen

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Rainbow layer cakes always look beautiful on Instagram, but seem way more intimidating to make behind the screen. If you’ve always aspired to baking a rainbow layer cake or hoping to try your hand at one in celebration of Pride month, fear not. It’s totally do-able — especially if you keep one thing in mind before you get started.

In her Rainbow Layer Cake class available on the Food Network Kitchen app, Molly Yeh breaks down how easy it can be to put this impressive sweet stack together. She starts with eight cups of vanilla cake batter – it can be from a box or any recipe you love – divided equally between six bowls. But, she warns, when bringing together your cake batter, be sure to keep it a little undermixed. Once the batter is poured into the bowls, you’re going to add gel or liquid food coloring and swirl in until homogenous to complete the mixing process. This prevents overmixing the batter, so you don’t end up with gummy cake.

Here’s the important part: Molly shares that you can use one spatula to mix all six colors. One! And there’s no need to clean the spatula completely between colors. No extra dishes or washing. If you start with the lightest color, yellow, and move through the rainbow (green, blue, violet and so on), you need only scrape your spatula with a clean dish towel between swirls. Yellow is present in green, and so on, so mixing in this order won’t muddle the colors. Plus, you’ll save some extra time at the kitchen sink.

Check out Molly’s class on the app for more tips on how to make this stunning dessert a success.

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