Birthdays

I'm gearing up for my son's first birthday this week (February 22!) and while we're not throwing a party for him (if he had little cousins in the area, or at least some grandparents nearby, I'd make more of an effort, but really, he's a year old - as long as we get some pics of him with his cake (for posterity's sake), he'll never know or care), I am trying to figure out what type of a cake I should make for the occasion. 

Here's one that I made in the fall for a friend's babyshower.  It was inspired by this cake that I found on Pinterest in my early days of pinning.  The original pin no longer exists for some reason (so I can't link to the blog that I learned from, I'm sorry), but it was a rainbow layered cake.  I used this recipe for a simple white cake, which turned out fairly dense, though it had a yummy sugar cookie taste to it.  I found this recipe for buttercream icing on Pinterest and went with that. 

I divided my cake batter roughly into five equal parts in cereal bowls, and added a LOT of food colouring into each bowl to create the desired colours.  (You'll want to start with a fresh yellow food colouring, as it's the most used colour when making these colours.  And you'll also go through almost a whole bottle of red.)  I happened to have 5 round cake pans, so I poured each cake into its own pan, and baked them in batches of 3 and then 2.  Three of my cake pans did not have the handy scraping handle that travels around the bottom of the pan to help lift the cake out after baking, so I cut 3 circles of parchment paper and lined the bottoms of the pans before pouring in the batter.

I could have just put a layer of white icing in between each cake (which would look sharp), but chose to make it a touch more rainbow-y, and divided the icing as I had done the cake batter, and coloured it up. The result was a sweet, slightly dense, but very delicious and happy cake.  I'll be using this design again.