Mini Naked Rainbow Lemon Layer Cake Recipe

These babies have been my best party contribution over summer. After being super happy with my experiment one evening, I have made them quite a few times now to share. They are not as complicated or long winded as they look and they always go down a treat. I make them in my favourite cake flavour - Lemon!

I am one that likes to experiment and I like to do my own thing when I'm cooking. This can mean lots of fails and tries when it comes to baking. One component I have always struggled with is getting the perfect buttercream icing and somehow my batches always ended up harder than they should be.  After so long, I finally have the right recipe! I found it through Bake Club. Bake club is a new online magazine, membership and community. Having recently signed up, I have been having a lot of fun browsing through their recipes, listed techniques and online community. I found the buttercream recipe through a video tutorial and it was simple, to the point and easy to follow. They currently offer a free 30 day membership which is a great amount of time to navigate your way through and decide if you want to continue your subscription.

I've spoken about my love for gel food colouring before and these are a must to perfect the vibrant colours in this cake. Make sure you only preheat the oven just before you start preparing your batter and make sure its not too hot when you bake. If it is a brown crust will form around your beautifully coloured layers.

Mini Naked Rainbow Lemon Layer Cakes

Total time: 2 hours
Ingredients

• 300g butter
• 430g caster sugar
• 4 eggs
• rind from 1 lemon
• 300g plain flour (sifted)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 160ml milk
• Gel food colouring (3 colours of your choice)

Buttercream icing

• 400g icing sugar (sifted)
• 150g unsalted butter (softened)
• 3-5 tsp milk
• 1 tsp lemon essence

Cooking Directions

1. Line 3 shallow silicon cake pans (19cm diameter) with a butter non stick spray (you can spread a thin amount of butter too). Preheat oven to 160 degrees, make sure you don't do this too early or your coloured layers will form a brown crust.
2. Cream butter and sugar in a bowl using an electric mixer and then add eggs one by one and then add lemon rind and mix through lightly with wooden spoon.
3. Add flour, baking powder and milk and stir lightly with wooden spoon until just combined.
4. Separate the batter into 3 even batches (weigh them if you want it to be perfect) and add your gel colours to each batch. Be generous, you want your layers to be vibrant.
5. Bake the layers for 15 minutes to start. They may need an extra 5 minutes but check regularly. Once the layers spring back and a skewer is clean once inserted into the middle the layers are done. Allow to cool for at least 30 minutes.
6. Using a small cookie cutter (4.5cm diameter), cut out 10 round pieces from each layer and cut off any brown crust with kitchen scissors. You will have 30 round pieces in total, 10 x 3 of each colour. You may want to even out the layers to make it easier to stack.
7. For the icing, combine the icing sugar and butter with a wooden spoon. Add in milk starting with 3 tablespoons and adding more if needed. It should be a thick and creamy consistency. Add in lemon essence and combine well.
8. To ice, spread a thin layer of icing mixture between each layer of cake. Pop the remaining mixture into a piping bag and pipe the top of the cakes.
9. You will have remaining offcuts of the cake. Be creative with what you do with those. Shot glasses work well with layers of cake and icing. Depending on how creative you are you may need to make another batch of icing.

I will definitely be putting these on the treat table at baby girl first party in two weeks.

I love to hear about you all using my recipes, if you have a go at these please do give me a shout!

* I received a 2 month online membership and magazine subscription to baked & delicious to try out. All opinions are honest and my own.

Kat x

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