Name of baker: Samantha Harvey

Name of cake: Rainbow cake

Ingredients:
For the cake
285g caster sugar
285g butter
5 eggs
340g SR flour
6 ml vanilla essence

For the filling, icing and decoration
6 TBSP jam of your choice
400g butter
800g icing sugar
1 TBSP just boiled water
Sprinkles of your choice
Silver dragees

Method:
For the cake 
Grease and line 2 8″ round sandwich tins and preheat the oven to 170 degrees C.
Cream the butter and sugar together until very pale and fluffy.
Add the eggs one at a time and beat into the mixture, beat in the vanilla essence.
Fold in the flour using a large metal spoon.
Divide the mixture between the 2 prepared pans.
Bake for approx 30 mins or until golden and cooked through.
Rest for 5 mins before turning out and set aside to cool.

For the decoration
Beat the butter until pale and aerated.
Add in the icing sugar and water and beat until white and fluffy.

To assemble the cake
Spread the jam on one side of one of the cakes and some icing on one side of the other cake and sandwich together.
Coat the entirety of the vertical sides of the cake in the icing.
Tip the sprinkles in to a large tray and roll the cake through the sprinkles.
Stick the cake to a cake board and ice the top layer. Cover with sprinkles and decorate with silver dragees as desired.

A bit about yourself and how you got in to baking/ why you chose to volunteer with Free Cakes for Kids Hackney
Having trained as a chef back in Australia I now manage a central London Cookery school. I have always enjoyed baking and was lucky enough that growing up every year my mum always made my sister and I a homemade birthday cake, which even thinking about now I have such fond memories of. Now that my job is not 100% in a kitchen, I actually really miss it and find that baking allows my creative side to really come out. I started volunteering for FCFK as I was looking to contribute some time to a local charity and after recently moving to the area thought this would be a perfect opportunity. Having such great memories of all my birthday cakes it feels me with great sadness to think that a child’s birthday would go by without a cake.