This is a FUN project for your Saturday! My girls helped me with it and they loved it. The idea for Rainbow Cupcakes actually came from my 3 – 3/4 yr. old daughter. When it was my birthday, my husband asked Addie what kind of cake they should make mommy for her birthday. Her answer- RAINBOW! Rainbow is her absolute favorite color right now. Well, they didn’t get around to making mommy a Rainbow cake, but I thought this would be a great baking challenge to do together anyway, since I was so interested in how how these were going to turn out myself!
This baking challenge is not only FUN to eat it is also great to use when teaching your toddlers about colors in general, mixing colors and the rainbow! ROYGBIV all the way! (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet)
It is a really simple recipe, but it can be a bit time consuming. The cake batter doesn’t take long to mix up, and dying the batter is quick, but filling muffin tins layer by layer with all 6 colors- does make the minutes add up! I don’t think this is something I will do all the time, but for special occasions or when teaching the girls about colors or Noah’s Ark, this is a great recipe to use!
Here is what you need:
White Cake Mix, 3 eggs (egg white only), applesauce (We use this instead of veg. oil (equal proportion to oil)- it is better for you and it makes your cake so moist!), cupcake liners, white icing and a rainbow of food dye
Step 1:
Mix your white cake mix, applesauce and 3 egg whites together. (I didn’t write down how much applesauce, but use the directions on the back of your box and substitute equally applesauce instead of oil). My daughter, Addie was SUPER excited to be helping me bake. I tried to let her do as much as a 3 3/4 year old could do by herself.
Step 2:
Divide your batter equally among 6 bowls (we did not make the “Indigo” color, as the blue and violet blended together anyway to sort of make indigo). I just used a measuring cup and kept diving it until there was no batter left!
Step 3:
Now take a look at the back of your food dye and it will tell you exactly how many drops to put in each bowl to dye it the shade you want! It was so fun to make the purple and orange b/c we mixed two different colors and my girls LOVED seeing it turn from yellow and red into orange.
Step 4:
Put a portion of each colored batter into a ziploc bag. You will then want to make sure to get most of the air out of the bag and seal it shut. Next, cut the corner of one of the ends of your bag. You will want to cut a small size opening.
The first batch up Rainbow cupcakes took me a very long time to make because I used a spoon instead of doing the bags. After taking 45 minutes to fill 12 cupcakes I thought, THERE HAS TO BE A BETTER WAY TO DO THIS! That is how I came up with the ziploc bag idea! It works so much better than the spoon b/c it is faster and you can make sure you get all the way to the edge of the cupcake a lot easier.
Step 5: Build your layers of cake batter (Remember ROYGBIV)
The first picture is when I used the “spoon method.” Notice how I was not able to get to the edges. I had to use the spoon to spread the batter around, try and get it to the edges without mixing the 2 colors!
The second picture shows the MUCH EASIER WAY when using a Ziploc bag. I started by “drawing” a circle w/ the batter around the edges. Then I just filled it in with the batter. It is important to reach the edges, so that when you take the cupcake out of the wrapper, you see the Rainbow!
It was also much faster to do one color at a time. So start with Red and do 12 cupcakes, then orange on top of that, then yellow and so on. You do not bake in between! You are simply layering the colored batter on top of each other.
Step 6: Bake according to package directions. Then ice with white icing.
This is Addie, who gave me the idea in the first place to make Rainbow Cupcakes. She is so proud!
This is Sophie, who also loves cupcakes… but really loves the icing most of all. She eats her cupcakes icing side first from top to bottom.
Here is what the inside of the cupcake looks like:
Pretty cool, huh?!?
Another great teaching tool to use these cupcakes is to talk about love and the joy of giving to others! After working so hard on our cupcakes, the girls came up with 3 people to go and take Rainbow cupcakes. Others enjoyed our hard work and our girls were shown how much joy we can give others!
I hope you enjoy the cupcakes!
DizzyLizzy says
These were so cute and yummy! Definitely a big hit with the kids at my daughter’s birthday party this weekend! Thanks for the idea!