Have you ever tried rainbow cake?

We are just back after a refreshing jog up through the woods to the next village where we went looking for a beaver's lodge. It has just snowed and the scenery looks exactly as though dusted with icing sugar , just like the cake which is on the table downstairs which we will be tucking into very soon as it is that time of day on Sunday . Well my chocolate and cherry cake looks perfect, just like any other Swiss gugelhopf and so it should be- it is baked and shaped to perfection following a Swiss recipe and helped along with all my kitchen gadgets which I seem to love buying or ordering from Betty Bossi. My love of gadgets though will have to wait for another blog . Of course this conventional cake is nothing like the one I tried the other day fondly known as "rainbow cake" and lovingly baked by a rather unconventional American colleague. She had generously brought the cake along to a farewell party and I have to say here I myself would never have been brave enough to do such a thing fearing those typical Swiss comments on our rather less sophisticated cooking in the Anglo Saxon world. Well this colleague does not burden herself with such worries and that's why she is so loveable. When she handed the cake around I looked at it and saw this was not rainbow cake but psychedelic cake! I did not see a bow but more a kaleidscope pattern of twerling colours . I asked myself whether it merely appeared to have the colours of the rainbow because of what we may have unwittingly consumed beforehand. You know what I mean San Francisco and all that? Well I tried the cake and it was good and it was a great feeling to have actually tried rainbow cake . An achievement in fact, compared to our visit to Amsterdam in summer when we didn't get to trying THE CAKE!"
After mentioning at a party last summer of our plans to visit darling daughter in Holland , a former colleague launched into these tales of the adventures he had had "trying the cake " in the coffee houses of Amsterdam . In fact he seems to have lost a day or so of his life after being really stoned on the contents of these "cakes ". So apart from wishing to add to our cultural CV with all those three "H" ( historical , horticultural and one other! ) must do visits in Amsterdam, we put coffee shops on our list.
Ah well when we got there those coffeeeshops were not like the hip jazz cafés which we are used to in Switzerland or America , no they didn't look inviting at all. The clientèle looked pretty uninspiring actually so in the end we gave them a miss. Maybe that was a pity .
Well I've just got my work schedule for the spring and summer and see a few nice weekends where we can fit in a visit back to darling daughter and this time I'm inspired. We'll go to a coffee shop and I'm looking forward to the reaction when I step in and ask for a piece of rainbow cake! Maybe somebody will have to take a chill pill there !!