Rainbow Cake and Cake Push Pops

For Maeve's first birthday, I wanted nothing but a rainbow cake.  For the past few months, I've been looking for ideas, and even tried a few different ways of decorating cupcakes.  In the end, the decision was easy, once I searched for rainbow cakes on pinterest and found the idea for THIS cake on Bakingdom blog.

My heart didn't come out quite as nice as hers, but hey, I had a migraine while I was doing this.

I was so excited to try and make the cake, but honestly, as the day approached, I began to get nervous.  I felt like such a cake was WAY out of my league!  I was thinking I'd have to make three batches of batter just to make all the cakes for the layers.  Then, I went to Sur La Table and I found the cutest little cake pans- they are only like 4-5 inches.

About two weeks ago, I decided to try to make the rainbow cake.  To make it, you have to make two 6-layer cakes!  I used the recipe I posted a few weeks ago for vanilla bean cupcakes with vanilla bean icing.

Here are the mini cakes:

Then, I frosted them with a coordinating color frosting, and stacked them into layers of three:

I refrigerated them to let the set about 20 minutes, before cutting out the centers to do the internal switch.  Then, I stacked the cakes to make the two 6-layer cakes.  I frosted the outside with a thin layer of plain white frosting.

The way I did this is explained here at I Am Baker.  I found the link from the Bakingdom blog.

The big reveal:

We had a practice birthday that night, since I had already cut the cake:

Since it came out the way I wanted, I froze the second cake.  It was in a tupperware in the freezer for almost 2 weeks.  I put it in the fridge the night before her bday, then on the counter about 3 hours before the party, and it tasted GREAT!  Huge time saver for a future birthday-make the cake ahead of time and freeze it!

I spent so much time putting them together and making sure they were in the right order, but failed to take into account that once you cut into the cakes, the top layers would be flipped over to connect them, so that is why my layers are not red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.  In the end, I don't care, they came out better than I thought, so I was very happy.

Since the cake was rather tiny to feed all of us at the party, there needed to be more cake.  So, let there be cake push pops!

For the push pops, I used the same cake recipe (doubled) as for the layer cakes and the same vanilla bean icing recipe.  I lined the bottom of my rimmed cookie sheets with parchment paper and greased the sides with butter.  I divided the cake batter into six pans, and used Americolor food color gels to color them.  Then, I was able to spread 2 colors in each cookie sheet, 1 on each half and spread them to meet in the middle.  It was only about 1/4 inch of batter in the pan.  I wanted it to be thin.  I baked each pan about 5 minutes, then rotated it, and baked for 6 minutes more.

Once the cakes were cool, I used a shot sized measuring cup to punch out cake circles.  I layered the cake circles into the push pops, starting with purple, and ending with red.  Between each layer, I put a circle of vanilla icing around the cake circle, then I'd add in another circle.  On top, I made a bigger swirl of frosting topped with rainbow non-pareil sprinkles.  These were such a huge hit with the kids, assured that all cake was eaten, and NOT just frosting and was so much less messy.

I got the push pop containers on amazon.com.

St. Patrick's Day (part II)

Here's the rest of our St. Patrick's Day, we had a small get together at our house to decorate cookies. I made green sugar cookies, in the shape of circles and colored icing for the kids to decorate them with. I made each kid a plate with a "color pallette" of frosting to decorate with:



For snacks we had green popcorn, of course. I made it by melting green chocolate and drizzling it over microwave popcorn:



Finally, my masterpiece, a fruit rainbow:



We also played find the pot of gold. I hid five clues around the yard and the last one led them to a pot of gold (a black bowl filled with any candy I could find that had a gold wrapper, resee's miniatures, twix, gold coins, and hersey's kisses with almonds). The kids were a bit disappointed that it was candy, not real gold, duped by the leprechaun again!

Happy St. Patrick's Day (part I)

I just finished setting up the kitchen area for St. Patrick's Day, since it's already so late, I figured I'd post the pre St. Patrick's Day pictures, as I'm sure there will be a lot more to post about after our little party tomorrow.

I'll start off with our leprechaun trap. It isn't as elaborate as I've been imagining it would be, especially since we didn't start it until this afternoon at four and didn't finish it until after dinner at 8:30. Nathaniel came up with the idea on his own for it to be a rocket and then when the leprechaun got inside, it would blast off into space!




We had some action figure with boots I was able to twist off, I left one inside the house, where he had placed five fake gold coins and then one dangling on the ladder, shown here:



With the fake gold, I made a trail to the couch, where I left 4 ten yen coins and 1 five yen coin in a pile under it.



For decorations, I was trying to be environmental and used the same streamers we had up from Addison's birthday, that I conveniently just took down yesterday. I made a streamer rainbow, I realize the cloud looks silly made of the white streamers, but hey, it's all I had to work with.



I ran shiny gold ribbon from under the stuffed leprechaun to three different locations, each hiding a small treasure:



For our other decorations, I had printed some coloring pages from the internet, then I printed some outlines of shamrocks, which I had left on the table all week, with a set of watercolors, and our dot to dot markers. After they were colored, I cut them out and taped them onto the edge of the island, I think the colors look neat.



The leprechaun is sitting on a black pot filled with gold fabric scraps (if I have time tomorrow AM, I will finish the gold coins I started three weeks ago). Also, in the pot, are these lucky penny cards. I found the idea here at pumpkin petunia. I did wash the pennies with lemon juice/salt solution and they don't look brand new, but do look a LOT nicer!



I couldn't resist these wicked cute cupcake toppers! I found them at Living Locurto. For now, they are sitting on the counter, but tomorrow, they'll be on cupcakes, in my dream, they'd be sitting on some chocolate chip muffins right now.



From our R for Rainbow theme with the little ones, I traced the word rainbow onto paper and let them fill it in with their dot to dot markers:



Finally for this post, one of my favorite things, a game I made up tonight. I have been trying to think of an addition game to help Nathaniel be lightning quick with his single digit addition facts. I used our dot to dot markers and some shamrock stickers to make the game. I laminated it for more durability. I cut out gold coins from my shiny gold scrapbook paper, and I found these cute shamrock dice here, such an unexpected gem of a find! I'm not sure how we're going to play yet, if he'll just move based on the dice count and if he lands on a large shamrock, he'll get one gold coin, and a small colored one, he'll get 2 gold coins. I do know if Owen or Hazel plays, they will use the colored spinner from our other homemade games and just go by color. Owen could probably just do the one dice method too. Regardless of the rules, I just love to look at the colorful game board, don't you? Oh, did you notice the orange and green cars above the board? Of course, we love cars here, so being that they're the Irish flag colors, we laminated them to be our playing pieces for now :)