Hi there friends.  I’m on a run of fairly deep pre-ambles for my blog posts and I guess this one is no different. June-July marked Pride in all of its glittery rainbow joy. On a more personal level I did LGBT+ ally training at work which got me thinking {a lot, as per usz}.

I am lucky, if you can call it that, in that I don’t see being LGBT+ as anything unusual. You’ve got no choice in who you love, so go do what/who makes you happy {it should go without saying, as long as it’s consensual}. But I say that from an incredibly privileged position: I am a white, straight, able-bodied woman. Despite the odd mental health wobble I have things really, really good.

We talked a lot about privilege on that training day and it was something I was vaguely aware of but had never really considered in much depth. If you have been able to experience the benefits of privilege throughout your life, it’s your responsibility to call out hatred and abuse towards the less privileged.

Anyway, I hope it gets you thinking too.

Perhaps jarringly, we had a cake sale at work shortly after the training and my fellow ally and I agreed a rainbow cake would be a good idea to raise some awareness at work that we were around if anybody needed to talk.I’m sure you’ve seen the 7-tier odes to food colouring that are the traditional ‘rainbow cake’. I love them but the sheer amount of buttercream and sweetness is way too overwhelming for me. When I went to Belfast in January, I ordered a piece but shared it with my two besties, and even then we couldn’t stomach all of it.

Exhibit A: The classic layered rainbow cake in all its sugary glory

Cupcake Jemma does a reverse version where the rainbow is in the buttercream rather than the cake layers, and I thought this was a much better idea. I was planning to do 3 layers rather than 2, but after baking and cooling them one looked quite underdone, and I decided against the possibility of causing a lot of upset tummies at work.

So how do you get the effect? You’re going to need a lot of {biodegradable} piping bags, my friend. Once you’ve made up all of your colours {I think I went for just 6 in the end, because nobody’s discerning between indigo and violet}, you pipe concentric circles of each one, starting with red on the outside and working your way to purple in the centre {which is why you need much more red than you do purple}.

Stack your cakes as usual and ice the outside in a plain white. You can leave it there if you want the rainbow inside to be a complete surprise, but it was late at night, my judgement was poor and I decided to go *extra* and do a rainbow on the top as well.

Since this was a little while ago, I’ve lost my scrap of paper with my measurements on, but hopefully the photos are enough of a help if you want to recreate this. See also:

• White cake recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction
• Reverse rainbow cake tutorial from Cupcake Jemma