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Rainbow Striped Cake
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Sep 6, 2024
Looking for quick cake decorating techniques? Decorate a cake in 5 minute with gorgeous ruffles with this quick and easy technique, using just a piping bag and a piping tip! *Start your FREE 7 day trial on my cake school https://britishgirlbakes.teachable.com/p/all-you-can-cake/ *LEARN The Basics of Cake and The Basics of Buttercream in my most popular online courses! https://britishgirlbakes.teachable.com/ *My 4 Minute Buttercream recipe https://www.britishgirlbakes.com/recipes/buttercream-frosting/ *READ a written version of this tutorial (with photos!) https://www.britishgirlbakes.com/rainbow-striped-cake-with-heart/ *SUBSCRIBE to my channel for a new cake decorating tutorial every week! *SAY HI! Website: https://www.britishgirlbakes.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/britishgirlbakes
View Video Transcript
0:00
In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to mix rainbow colors using just one bowl
0:04
how to create a completely flat rainbow hard design on top of the cake
0:08
and how to make perfectly neat rainbow-striped frosting. Start by assembling your cake by layering cake layers and filling
0:19
and I'm using huge 10-inch cake layers here, but of course this will work with any size cake
0:24
I'm using my perfect chocolate cake and my 4-minute buttercream, and both recipes are on British Girl Bakes.com
0:30
Cover the cake in a crumb coat, which I like to pipe on just because it pulls off fewer crumbs in the process
0:34
but you can spread it straight on instead. The important thing here is to cover up the entire cake
0:40
This crumb coat doesn't have to be super smooth, its entire purpose is to catch any crumbs that come off the cake
0:45
So once you've made sure there's no exposed cake, put the entire cake into the fridge for about 30 minutes or the freezer for 15 minutes to set this crumb coat
0:53
Now let's tint the colors for the rainbow design. You're going to need piping bags of every color that you want to use
0:59
The easiest and quickest way to do this is using just one bowl. And the way to do this is to put some plain white butter cream into your bowl and add yellow first
1:07
I know we're not going in rainbow order but you'll see why in a second. Mix your yellow, put that into a piping bag with no piping tip and I like to fold over the top of the piping bag
1:15
as I'm spooning the butter cream in so that the butter cream doesn't get all over my hands later when I'm piping
1:20
Now do orange in the same bowl, stirring to incorporate all of the leftover yellow frosting instead of having to wash and dry the bowl before you do this
1:29
scoop up the orange butter cream, put that into a piping bag with no piping tip and now do pink in the same bowl
1:34
again incorporating any leftover orange butter cream. Next we'll do purple and then blue and finally green
1:40
and the reason for doing it in this order is that each of the previous colors blends really nicely with the next color
1:46
so it won't dirty or muddy your colors. Now we're going to start with the rainbow heart design on the
1:52
top of the cake before doing the stripes. You'll need an open star piping tip for this and to avoid using couplers or multiple
1:59
piping tips, just drop this tip into another piping bag and then one by one you'll use the
2:04
colours that you've prepared in the piping bags with no tips inside this piping bag. Take your
2:09
cake out of the fridge or freezer and now that the crumb coat has set it going to be very firm and that means you won damage it during this process Use a toothpick to draw a heart onto the top I made six rainbow colors so I dividing my heart into six equal sections to guide me as I pipe
2:24
and then starting at the top of the heart with my pink, I'm piping little rosettes to fill in that first section
2:29
trying to space them evenly and also making sure that the piping goes right up to the edges of the outline I drew so that the shape is really clear
2:36
When you finish with the pink, pull it out of the piping bag and put your orange piping bag in next
2:42
Squeeze a little bit of buttercream out into a bowl to get rid of the very last bit of pink frosting
2:46
until you see the orange coming out and then pipe onto the next section of the cake
2:50
Again making sure you go right up to the edges of the outline of this section so that the shape is really recognisable later
2:57
Take the orange out, put the yellow in and squeeze a little bit of buttercream out until you see the yellow coming through
3:02
and then repeat this process to complete the heart. Of course, if you have lots of different piping tips you want to use, that's fine
3:08
Or you could use couplers in the original piping bags. But if you don't, this is a really quick and easy way to do this using minimal tools
3:16
Next, put the cake in the freezer for 15 minutes, and the reason for this is to set the
3:20
heart design you've just piped so that it holds its shape for the next step
3:24
When you take it out of the freezer, pipe buttercream to cover the top of the cake
3:28
and the reason for piping it is so that you don't damage those piped colourful details
3:32
Spread it very gently and then put this cake back into the freezer for 20 minutes
3:36
I know there's a lot of back and forth at this point, but it really is worth it. The result is stunning
3:40
When you take the cake out of the freezer, all of that frosting will have set. And to take off the top layer of frosting and reveal the design underneath, pour some boiling water into a cake pan that is as big as your metal cake comb
3:51
Dip your cake comb in to heat it, dry it off, and then scrape over the top of the cake
3:56
You'll need to scrape several times to take off all of the excess butter cream, but this is not going to be wasted, you can save it and use it for your cake
4:02
stripes or for another project later so scrape it all off into a bowl for now. Keep
4:06
dipping your metal cake comb into the hot water to keep it hot and that will make
4:09
it the easiest to take off these layers of buttercream from the top of the cake
4:13
Once your entire design has been revealed, scrape around the sides of the
4:18
cake so there's no frosting sticking out and use your offset spatula to push
4:22
sideways to tidy up the top edge of the cake so it sharp and smooth Now it time to make the rainbow stripes You need a striped cake comb and these come in lots of of different shapes and sizes When you choosing one keep in mind that the trickiest combs to use have the grooves very tightly spaced together
4:38
but the wider they are, the easier it is. Push your cake comb into the side of the cake to indent the grooves of the stripes
4:45
which you'll use as a guideline in a minute, and do this periodically so that you have lots of guidelines all around the cake
4:51
Choose the order that you want to pipe your colours, and pipe the colours that go into the areas where you don't see
4:57
any markings on the cake. So I'm skipping pink at the very bottom and doing orange first
5:02
using my guidelines to make sure I'm doing a straight band all the way around the cake. And at the
5:06
beginning when you cut your piping bags, which you'll then fill with these rainbow colours of
5:10
buttercream, it's a good idea to refer to your striped cake comb to see how wide the grooves are
5:15
and then cut the piping bags so that they match that size, and that way you only have to go once
5:20
around the cake to fill in the entire width of the stripe. Skip the next color, which is yellow for me
5:25
and then do the next color, which is green, again in the space between the lines that you can see scored on the cake
5:31
Skip the next color, blue, and do the following color, which is purple, and go all the way up to the very top of the cake
5:37
and don't worry if your butter cream sticks up above the top edge of the cake, that's going to give us really nice sharp edges later
5:44
Now take your striped cake comb and scrape around the cake. Push the base down on the cake board so it's lined up straight, and use your left hand to spin the turntable
5:52
so that you're not really moving the striped cake comb and spin the turntable all the way around as far as you can
5:57
to get a really nice sweep around the cake and your stripes should already have quite nice definition
6:03
It's going to take several scrapes and touch-ups though. So after one or two scrapes
6:07
go back to each of your stripes and check that the buttercream does fill in
6:11
the entire stripe groove from the cake comb. And you'll know if it doesn't
6:15
if there are any areas where the edge of the buttercream is not perfectly straight. If there's an indent where there seems to be buttercream missing
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take your piping bags and fill that in with the right colour of course
6:26
Scrape again, do any more touch-ups that you need to do, and don't worry about these stripes being perfectly neat on the outer edge
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because you're actually going to scrape a little bit off. But you do want the top and bottom edge of each stripe to be perfectly straight
6:38
Otherwise, you'll get other colours into any gaps, and you have random dots of different colours within the stripes on your cake When you happy with these stripes put the cake in the freezer for 15 minutes and set a timer because you don want to leave it in any longer or it going to be very difficult to do the next step When you take it out of the freezer pipe on the missing
6:56
stripes. So for me, that's going to be pink at the bottom, going all the way up the sides of the
7:01
cake. And now it's time to scrape off the excess, which will look really messy at first
7:06
but be patient, trust the process, this is going to turn out beautiful in the end. With the first few
7:12
scrapes, you'll smudge all of this excess frosting all over the cake and you'll cover up the first
7:16
stripes that you made. But that's the reason for chilling this cake before piping in this second
7:21
round of colours. Because now those first colours you piped are cold and firm and they won't lose
7:26
their shape. So even as you're scraping off the excess of the second round of colours, you're not
7:30
going to damage the stripes underneath. Keep scraping taking off all of that excess and your stripes are
7:35
going to get more and more defined. And once you get to the end, when they're almost perfect, if you find
7:40
that the frosting isn't perfectly smooth and you have some air bubbles in it. A quick hack is to heat
7:45
that metal cake come again, just like we did on the top of the cake. And heating the metal just makes it
7:50
glide very smoothly over the frosting and it actually melts the very outer layer of frosting
7:54
which will fill in any air pockets and leave perfectly smooth frosting. I don't recommend tidying up
8:00
the top edge yet because you will spread that colour over on top of your heart design. So instead
8:06
put the cake back into the freezer for 15 minutes to set the frosting. And then when you take
8:10
take it out of the freezer, use a sharp knife to cut off that frosting that's sticking up around the top edge and you'll leave a perfectly even edge underneath
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You'll get the best results if your knife is hot, so dip it into a glass of hot water or that pan of hot water you were using earlier
8:24
With new hot water, of course, because the old water will have cooled down. Now you have perfectly neat rainbow stripes around the sides of the cake, a sharp top edge and a flat top with this gorgeous rainbow heart design, which looks like it's been painted or printed onto the cake because it's totally flat
8:39
which is really unusual for designs done with buttercream. I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial
8:44
visit my cake school on Britishgirlbakes.com to learn hundreds of cake decorating techniques and designs
8:49
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8:53
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