Rainbow cake!

This cake was promised to a 5th grade math class for finishing fractions. I wanted to make a rainbow cake and this seemed the perfect excuse! I followed Baked Bree's recipe for Funfetti Cake. I didn't really realize how lemon-y it would be and that the tiny humans don't usually like lemon.. but thankfully they LOVED IT! It might have been the colors that disguised the lemon flavor with FUN!! Now when you read this recipe, don't judge me for not realizing the flavor was going to be super lemon-y.  

First add 1 1/2 cups of sugar to your bowl. Add two teaspoons of lemon zest (I just estimated). Combine with your fingers (rub the zest all over the sugar). Someone told Baked Bree to do this. So I did it. So I'm telling you to do it too. 

Then add 1 tsp of lemon extract to this sugary mix. 

To this add one stick of room temperature butter to the mix and cream. 

Now it's time to get your dry and wet mixes together. First for the dry: combine 2 1/4 cups of cake flour with 1 tbsp baking powder and a pinch of salt. Separately mix up the wet: 1 1/4 cups buttermilk and 4 egg whites and whisk a bit (photo above).  Add 1/3 of the dry and 1/2 of the wet to the butter and sugar and mix. Continue until everything is combined. I decided to skip the sprinkles in lieu of the rainbow!

Then divide up the batter into smaller dishes for the coloring to begin. I used the color guides on the back of the food coloring box as a guide on how to get these colors. 

Once you have the several colors you desire start adding them to the cake pans. Since I was doing a double layer cake, I put half the colors in one pan and half in the other. Just don't mix too much or you might end up with brown batter.

Then bake it up at 350 for about 30 minutes! 

This is how these guys turned out! 

Unfortunately the weather conditions weren't great and these guys didn't rise... 

I threw togehter some plain buttercream. One cup of butter whipped until creamy, add a dash of vanilla (about a tsp), and gradually add about 3 cups of icing sugar (I usually use a bit less than this).  This will be a bit thick so adding a little milk or half and half or whipping cream will help the constancy (1-2 tbsp).  

Here's the frosting job. Since we were celebrating fractions, my mom had an idea to put a 1/19th fraction on the top because there are 19 kids in her math class. 

It's a bit demolished but here's a peek at the inside.