Puffed Rainbow Cake Tutorial
Today I'm sharing a Puffed Buttercream Rainbow Cake design that is perfect for birthdays, baby showers, and even St. Patrick's Day celebrations!
You'll learn how to make this quick and easy piped buttercream design as well as how to make an adorable rainbow cake topper!
Table of Contents
Why we Love It
There are so many reasons to love this cake! Here are just a few! (You'll find the video at the bottom of this post.)
- We love easy ways to frost cakes! This fun design can be changed up to just one or two colors. It is unique and interesting yet so simple!
- Would make a wonderful birthday cake design, baby shower cake, and more!
- As an optional step, the rainbow cake topper adds even more height and interest!
Materials for the Cake
In the video, I'm using a double barrel, 6" tier (4 cake layers with cake cardboard halfway up with 4 bubble tea straws beneath). If you'd like to learn more about creating a double barrel cake, we demonstrate the technique in our Bunny Cake Video.
However, this buttercream technique would work well no matter what the size of your cake is. If you run out of room for your puffy clouds at the bottom of the tier, the top of your cake is a great alternative (that was our original plan!)
- Buttercream: We used a double batch of our "Fluffy Vanilla Buttercream" recipe from the Recipes section but any buttercream that holds it's shape well will work!
- Colors: We used Americolor Deep Pink, Orange, Lemon Yellow, Electric Green, Sky Blue, & Regal Purple.
- Piping Tips: We used a Wilton Tip 12 (medium round tip) for each of our colors. If you don't have many of this size piping tip, try snipping the end off of your disposable piping bag and skip the tip altogether. See what you think! The look is very similar. Also, Small round piping tips 3 or 4 for the rainbow topper.
- Confetti Sprinkles for the top
- Gold Bow
- Candy Coating & Lollipop Sticks for the topper (we used Ambrosia brand bark coating, but any brand is fine.)
Buttercream
In today's tutorial, we used our Fluffy Vanilla Buttercream Frosting Recipe which you can find here: Fluffy Vanilla Buttercream. (Any pipeable buttercream frosting recipe will do!)
Our classic vanilla buttercream is a great choice as well, and doesn't contain shortening, if you prefer an all-butter buttercream option.
Cake Recipes
This puffed rainbow buttercream cake design would work with any of our cake recipes! Some popular choices are our White Velvet Cake, Marble Cake, Almond Cake, and Strawberry Cake.
Don't miss our full collection of go-to Cake Recipes and Cake Decorating Tutorials!
More Rainbow Cakes
Here are just a few more rainbow cake ideas for you! You can never go wrong with these colorful, festive cake designs.
Great video! Love the look of this cake, it's fun and fabulous! Very clever and creative as always! :)
Thanks MsGF!!! xoxo
Loved the look of this cake so much and gave it a try last night. Got to say it's not perfect but also not to bad given that i used what i had. Mixed my colors from scratch.
Thanks Farinia, I'm so glad that you made it! ;0)
That's just lovely. Thanks Melissa. Easy too (I think)!!!
Farina, that's just lovely.
Thank you elaine, thanks Melissa and Bebe for sharing your talents and skills. Amazing work. If i was not a working mom i would've baked day and night to try my hand at all the decoration methods. ?
Thank you so much Farinia!!
thank you so much. the cake is darling. i'm encouraged to try it!
So glad you shared this technique. My kiddo wanted a rainbow cake with a hard icing rainbow on top - not
Candy, icing. Had no idea how I’d deliver...until I saw this post. Thank you!
Thanks Gina, that's great- glad it helped!