'Little Twin Stars' Rainbow Orange Chiffon Cake

This is a 'Little Twin Stars' Rainbow Chiffon Cake for a pair of siblings celebrating their birthday together! It was such a joy to bake for them =). This is my first big 23 cm rainbow chiffon cake and that which is orange flavored! I was rather apprehensive about baking the rainbow chiffon in a big tin at one go with so many eggs, despite myself having helped many others scale it up. Thankfully it came out fine and the cake was very well-received (thank God)! So I will like to share with you the scaled up rainbow chiffon cake recipe. Hopefully it will help those who have bigger tins and would like to try the recipe (I have also added a note on how to modify recipe for vanilla flavor). The earlier Rainbow Chiffon Cake for a smaller 17 cm tin is here.

Pastel Rainbow Orange Chiffon Cake
Ingredients (for 23 cm chiffon tin)
8 egg yolks (I used Chew's medium eggs)
53g sugar
106g vegetable oil
117g orange juice (or 105g water, 12g vanilla extract)
160g cake flour
Wilton colours

11 egg whites
120g sugar
1/4 tsp cream of tartar

1. Preheat oven to 160°C. Prepare a tray of water at the bottom of the oven (I used the lowest rack to bake the cake). *You may omit steam baking; I like to use it to control my oven temperature rise.
2. Beat egg yolks with sugar with whisk till pale yellow before stirring in oil and orange juice.
3. Next add in sieved flour and whisk till no trace of flour found.
4. Divide the batter into 6 (approx 17 tsp). Mix in respective rainbow wilton colours.
5. Meringue: Beat the egg whites with ¼ tsp cream of tartar till stiff peak, mixing in caster sugar in 2 additions.
6. Divide the meringue into 6. Gently but quickly fold in the meringue into the 6 colours batter. You need to work very fast for the meringue not to deflate.
7. Scoop the pink batter evenly into the chiffon tin. Then repeat with orange, yellow, green, blue and violet respectively. Gently tap the tin on the counter top 3x to remove air bubbles.
8. Bake the chiffon cake for 15 min at 160°C and then at 150°C for 15 mins and 140°C for 30-31 min.
9. Invert the chiffon cake once removed from oven.
10. Unmould the chiffon cake by hand (watch Video tutorial 'Hand Unmoulding Chiffon Cakes for a Clean Finishing'). Gently pull the cake from the sides of the tin at each angle and push the removable base up to unmould the sides. To unmould the cake from the base, gently lift up the cake from the base using hands, repeating this at each angle before turning the base over.

*If you would like vanilla flavor, replace the orange juice with 105 ml water and 12 ml vanilla extract.

*I had been staying away from orange flavor as long baking times often leads to browning. So here I have further reduced the temperature to 140°C and it helps. I have also omitted the orange zest for prettier layers, so the orange taste will be milder compared with zest.

Freshly unmoulded orange pastel rainbow chiffon cake! =) Tall and sweet!

Picture tutorials for the Rainbow Chiffon Cake are now in Creative baking: Chiffon Cakes book.

The 'Little Twin Stars' characters were all made of chiffon cake. The faces were piped on oval bowls similar to Hello Kitty chiffon cakes (replace the bow with pink or blue hair). Everything else was cut out from layer chiffon cakes and brushed on with melted marshmallows. A nice tip we learnt is to further brush the cakes on top with syrup to keep moist =).

Here's a top view of the birthday cake made with lots of heart! =)

Happy birthday to Ethan and Leona!

With lots of love,
Susanne