What I Have Learned About Me

"... anything worth doing is worth doing well." Barbara Ehrenreich

What I have learned about me is that I don't give up. If I can not achieve it the first time, I take a different approach and try again.

There is no better example then the "psychedelic rainbow cake of 2010."

This year for my co-workers 36th birthday I decided that she needed this psychedelic rainbow cake that read about on http://www.omnomicon.com/rainbowcake

A cake like this screams I was born in the 70's! I love it!

So the recipe was easy enough:

2 boxes white cake mix

24 oz of clear diet soda (2 cans, ginger ale and sprite work well)

gel food colouring

16 oz whipped topping

2 oz instant fat-free sugar-free pudding mix (2 smallish boxes)

The Dieting
Mix the cake mix with the soda according to regular instructions on box. It will be lumpy afterward. Again, you can use any white cake recipe you want, this is just how I do it.

The Rainbowing
Measure the total volume (by my estimate, 64 oz), then divide by 6 and measure into separate bowls. There are 8 oz in a cup, so 64/6 = 10 to 11 oz, or 1 cup + 2 tbsp.

Stir colour into each bowl with its own spoon. For the first colour into the pan, measure out 2/3 to 3/4 of your mix (in this case about 1 c) as close to the middle as you can. Drop in your first three colours, then work on the other pan with the last three colours. So if you’re doing rainbow order, the first pan should have red, then orange, then yellow, and now the purple, blue and green go into the second pan. As a recap, this is so both layers are roughly the same size.

Bake the cake for however long the box tells you to bake it. Check it when the box says to, but usually it’ll need an extra 5 or 10 minutes or maybe more because of the density of the soda method. Just keep baking, checking back every 5 minutes or so until a toothpick to the center comes out clean. Let cool completely before moving to a wire rack.

And there was a recipe for frosting too:

Meanwhile, make your frosting. Just mix the pudding mix in with the whipped topping for a few minutes. Dye if you’re into that.

Frost your fat-free cake with your fat-free whipped frosting. Eat.

Initially I was thinking this would be so quick, so cute, not too bad for you and delicious.

Here is what I put in the oven:

And here is what I pulled out:

And this is what I did with it:

It gets better too, while my cake was baking I decided to make purple icing. Purple icing my friends, is not so easy to make:

So after my failed cake, my failed purple icing and a short temper tantrum, I gained my composure and created this:

And (literally 5 hours later) I ended up with this:

Sweet, sweet victory!

I can report that the soda cake was delicious! Who needs eggs and oil when you can use a can of Sprite?