In my post A Birthday Feast II that I wrote on Sunday I shared a picture of my birthday cake.

I mentioned that even though it looked like a very plain cake that it was very colorful. You will see the rest of the story in this post.

Earlier this year my friend John’s daughter posted a picture of an interesting cake that she had made for her little sister’s birthday. I asked if she would make me the same type of cake during my next trip to Canada and then it just worked out that my schedule took me there on my birthday.

The preparation of the cake started as any other cake would start with combining the wet and dry ingredients and then using a hand mixer to mix the batter.

Then the process got more complicated.

The batter was divided evenly between three bowls and food coloring was added to each of them. In the picture above you can see the yellow food coloring being added to one of the bowls.

Here are the three bowls of batter. I got to choose the colors so I chose green and blue as they are two of my favorite colors. Then I decided on yellow as it was a good complementary color.

Next up the batter was placed into two cake pans. The batter was placed in a colorful pattern and each layer had a different layout of colors. She started with large portions in the middle of each pan and then added smaller portions to fill them up.

Here the process is almost complete. There were still a few holes left, but they were soon filled in.

After the batter was portioned into each pan she took a knife and swirled the batter around a bit to further mix the colors and also evenly spread the batter in the pan.

Then it was into the oven for baking. Doesn’t this look beautiful? I really like the swirl of the colors. Do you think the bottom looks the same?

Since the knife only swirled the upper layer of the batter the bottom retained larger portions of the same color.

The two layers were then stacked and the cake was finished with white frosting. The cake looked very simple but it also hid a surprise waiting to be revealed.

Here is the cake showing where the first slice was cut out. You can see that it is very colorful.

Here is a nice side view of the first piece which ended up on my plate along with a nice scoop of vanilla ice cream. The cake was very delicious along with being very colorful.

Here is another view of the cake showing the colors. In my mind I have been calling it a patchwork cake, but with a little research I found that this term is not commonly used. The most common terms I could find were rainbow, tie-dye or simply multi-color cakes. I still like the term patchwork though.

I really enjoyed watching my friend’s daughter make the cake. I also enjoyed watching the reaction of others as she cut into the cake and revealed the colorful interior.

Thanks for the wonderful cake!

Steven