DreamOn Liner Cake

I lost a bet to one of my friends on whether the 787 Dream Liner would make its first flight before 2010. With all the deadlines it had already missed, I bet against the plane, and therefore owed my friend a cake. In true Boeing fashion, owed him a cake for about a year. But I did make it. I made the DreamOn Liner, because who knows when this thing will actually fly passengers.

I was being somewhat optimistic - I had it flying within the decade.

It's just a cake baked in a 9x13 pan, flipped out and cut to shape. The pieces I cut out were used to make the wings long enough and to make the tail. The cake was orange flavored and colored so it looked like the plane was exploding when you cut it up. Because fire and explosions are cool.

Rainbow Cake

Difficulty: Medium
Time: 3 hours
Price: $5+

This fall, I had one hour of class on Fridays and I got into the habit of making cakes in the afternoon until, inevitably, work and the strong desire to nap stomped on my happiness. This was definitely the most visually (and tastily) interesting of the cakes I made. In addition to each layer being a different color, I made each a different flavor with the help of all the different extracts in the spice isle at the supermarket.
Red: Cinnamon
Orange: Orange
Yellow: Lemon
Green: Mint
Blue: Raspberry
Purple: Spice (Cloves)

To make the cake, I started with a box of white cake mix and added the stuff it said to. Then, I divided it into six portions (about 2/3 of a cup each) and mixed in the colors and flavors. I used half to 1.5 tsp of the extract depending on how odorous it was for each portion and more food dye than the box suggested.

I baked the cake in a pot on the stove because each round was going to be pretty thin. I ligthly greased nonstick pan and cooked each like a giant pancake on medium-low heat. Flipping them was kind of hard. Once I flipped them, I squished down the middle a little bit to make the layer flatter. Because I wanted to frost the cake right away, I chilled them in the freezer and fridge as necessary.

Frosting them is an adventure in unhealthiness. Find your favorite frosting recipe (I one-and-a-halfed this cream cheese based recipe) and then get ready to lather it over EVERYTHING. Put the purple round down, spread as thin as possible a layer of frosting as possible over the top, put the blue layer on, repeat. Don't use lots of frosting because:
1. The cake is supposed to be rainbow flavored, not frosting flavored
2. Do you really want to eat that much frosting? and
3. More glue does not make things stick better. See Stefan's Equation.

This is about what my cake looked like during this step:


When you are finished all the layers, frost the entire outside of the cake and decorate it how you please. It now looks like this on the outside:


And it bleeds rainbows when you slice it open.


Yum!