Friday Family Fun: Rainbow cupcakes

For this third installment of my summertime Friday Family Fun series, after suggesting some places to get out and visit around the national capital, I thought I’d post a suggestion for a fun kid activity that you can do whether you live in Ottawa or anywhere else. We did this last weekend and the boys loved it!

You can start with cupcakes from scratch if you have that kind of talent, but we went with a box mix for plain vanilla cupcakes cuz that’s how we roll. However you start out, you should end up with a big bowl of cake batter. Separate that into as many bowls as you want colours — we went with four: red, green, yellow and blue. Add enough food colouring to each bowl of batter so you get a nice, rich hue.

We made cupcakes, but the first time I saw this was on Amy’s blog, where she did a whole cake this way. I personally like the cupcake thing — I like my activities and my snacks bite-sized! Put a spoonful or two of each colour into a cupcake sleeve, and keep dripping layers of colour in until the batter fills the cup.

As you can see, there’s not a lot of precision in our methodology. I’m learning to watch more and control less. It’s not always easy!

When you bake them, they end up like this.

As if fresh-baked cupcakes didn’t look delicious enough without the rainbow effect! And then, we added some frosting. Daddy dug out some star sprinkles to add just a bit more whimsey to the final product.

Some of ours ended up half yellow and half blue, or mostly green with a touch of pink, but a few actually ended up like I had intended, looking something like this:

Of course, this was the best part!

If you’re looking for a fun rainy-day activity this summer vacation, consider rainbow cupcakes. So easy that even we could do them, so I’m sure just about anybody could!

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