Nutella Frosted Rainbow Layer Cake

IT IS HERE. The first recipe.

Firsts can be scary. Your first day of school, first time driving, first date, first time bungee jumping! They can sometimes make you vulnerable and you never know what to expect. So be nice to us, we are newbies! We’ll get better.

One way to battle nerves, or prevent them from happening in the first place, is to be comfortable in what you are about to do. And we know desserts; we are comfortable in desserts, we LOVE desserts. A true meal is not complete until your taste buds have been fully saturated with some sugary deliciousness that fills your dessert stomach up to the brim until you are officially full (since you always have room for dessert right???). 

Now besides two of Jenna’s roommates [one who is allergic to tree nuts (poor thing), and another who has some weird thing against chocolate (crazy thing)], what is that one thing that makes meals complete better than anything else? NUTELLA. So we decided to cover our dessert with the best buttercream Nutella frosting we could make! Now we had to think what would make the inside of this Nutella covered goodness be the perfect start to our vlogging blog (video blogs intermixed in a blog)? Being a big fan of colors, the answer seemed like a no brainer: RAINBOW. As mentioned in our “about us”, we have a plan to fill our blog with a mixture of blog posts filled with pictures along with vlogs where you get to see our lovely personalities show you exactly what we are doing while making our food. (That we devour as soon as the camera is off).

To find the perfect recipe for our rainbow layered cake, we compared some basic vanilla cake recipes to come up with this one. While we used wheat flour, all-purpose flour works well, and if you don’t like the wheaty taste, it could even be better! (Ignore the measurements we said on the video. The following recipe is doubled and correct for 6 layers!)

5 cups all-purpose flour

4 cups sugar

2 cups milk

1 cup of butter (2 sticks)

8 eggs

4 ½ teaspoons baking powder

4 teaspoon vanilla
Food coloring

1.     Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease three 9-inches round cake pans, or how many you have. We could only fit three in the oven at one time so we baked then in two rounds. We also did 6 layers so keep that in mind. If you want to do fewer colors you obviously would use fewer pans.

2.     In a large mixing bowl, beat sugar and egg with an electric mixer until they are combined and thickened. Add flour, milk, butter, baking powder, and vanilla and beat until the batter is smooth and creamy, about a minute.

3.     Equally divide up the batter into six bowls (or how many layers you would like). You might notice that it appears that you have a lot more batter then we did. This is good!! We didn’t have enough to make six layers so we had to go back and double our recipe.

4.     Add food coloring to the batter and mix. Adjust color until you are content.

5.     Pour each color into a different pre greased pan. Bake in the preheated oven for 17-25 minutes.

6.     Let them cool and then cut out the cakes and put them on a drying rack. Wash your pans, REGREASE them and put the next set of cakes in the oven.

7.     Once all the cakes are out of the oven and cooled, shave the top of the cake off to form a flat top.

8.     Now the layers are ready to frost!

Here is the Nutella frosting recipe! We found it at mybakingaddicition.com, there are a bunch of tasty recipes there!

2 sticks unsalted butter, softened

1 13-ounce jar of Nutella (It seems like a lot but you won’t regret it!)

Pinch of fine grain sea salt

4-6 cups of confectioners’ sugar

6-8 tablespoons heavy cream or milk

1.     In a large mixing bowl, cream butter and Nutella until they are combined, thick and fluffy. This takes about 5 minutes, though it is combined within one minute keep mixing it until it’s thick and fluffy; you will see the consistency changing. Slowly add in confectioner’s sugar, continuously mixing until well blended.

2.     Add salt, vanilla, and 3 tablespoons of heavy cream or milk. Blend on low speed until moistened. Add the additional heavy cream or milk (and/or more sugar) until you get your desired consistency.

3.     Go frost your cake! Or finger J

As mentioned in the video don’t limit yourself to a simple rainbow cake, we encourage creativity! Here are some other suggestions we came up with:

Make a faded/ombre cake with all the same color of dye just different intensity

Color the layers your school colors for graduations

Make it the color of your favorite sports team (professional or college, Let’s go Red!)

Color it for holidays! (Pink/red/white for Valentine’s Day, black/orange for Halloween, red/white/blue for 4^th of July! Your options go on and on)

ENJOY!