Farewell Rainbow Cake

A friend from our Church is going to England as an exchange student for six months - leaving today, actually!  So I was asked to bake a farewell cake for her at our youth group.  It was the first time I had done a farewell cake, so I hit google to try and find out which design to do.  In the end, this was what I ended up with....

Making the cakes:  I decided to make a rainbow cake.  Well, actually, everyone else decided that I should make a rainbow cake.  I was feeling tired and not too well, so I didn't feel like putting in the effort for a rainbow, so I went searching online for an easier way to make them.  I had made two different types of rainbow cakes before:  the first method is to place all your coloured batter in separate Ziploc bags, snip off the end, and put a drizzle in the bottom of the pan.  Then get the next colour, and repeat.  Continue until all the batter is used up.  This makes the cake come out in little stripes, like in the middle of this cake:

 The other method is to bake the cakes all separately and join them with together with icing later.  Although both methods work well, they are time consuming and I didn't have a lot of that.  So instead, I coloured each cake and poured them into the pan on top of each other, hoping that it wouldn't come out a nasty brown. 

These were my colours:  (I have seemed to lost one of the photos, there were 5 colours...  )

I poured the mixture in on top of each other.  And then tapped the pan several times on the bench to get rid of any air bubbles.  It took a loooong time to cook, and I probably had too much mixture in the pan, but anyways! 

 This is the mixture poured in - and then I swirled it just a little with a knife before cooking it (Right)





And this is after it is cooked: (I cut it open to fill it with icing and also to see how it worked out.)  I was happy - and relieved! - with the results.

 For the icing, I decided to try something new, as you do when you are cooking a cake for a event! :P I read that adding copha to the icing would make it set harder crust better to get a nicer finish.  I had to leave the copha out in the sun for about 9 hours before it was soft enough to be beaten up.  Here is the recipe:

It makes quite a lot of icing, well and truly enough to this cake, and I put a lot on!

Ingredients: 
500g butter
250g copha
1kg icing mixture
Splash of milk

Method:
Beat butter and copha together until fluffy and white.  Add icing mixture and beat well, scraping down the sides regularly.  Add milk if it needs to be a little thinner.  

Then I iced the cake blue, cut out fondant countries, and made a little plane.  I didn't get photos of the process, but here is the finished product: (the lighting isn't great, but by the end I really couldn't care less if the photos came out well :P)