Party cake!!!

Since Katelynn turned two and she ate her birthday cake, she refers to all cake as "party cakes." This past week I had the honor of making our babysitters 13th birthday cake. Sydney is such a sweet girl and we feel so blessed to have her. (Her mom, Tammy, is my good friend that I work for at the flower shop) I was initially going to do zebra print with pink accents but when I opened the fondant package that was supposed to be black it was actually brown. I had to deviate from the plan and this is what it ended up as. I think it is really cute and I hope to someday make the zebra print as well. Now let's get to how I made this cake.

The cake itself is a "Butter Cake" and I use the Wilton recipe. I have tried a couple other recipes for "Butter Cake" and this is by far my favorite. I will explain how to make the rainbow effect at the end but let's talk icing, since that is my FAVORITE part of eating cake! I also use a Wilton recipe for "Buttercream Icing" because it is easy to make and it is also very easy to make variations of it by just adding different extracts.

As far as making the inside of the cake look like a rainbow these are the steps I followed:

Divide the batter amongst the amount of bowls based on the number of colors, I did five. Then whisk a fair amount of the appropriate food color into each bowl. When I say fair amount, I mean A LOT of good quality food coloring. Below is a picture of what I use and it works awesome! Pour into the pans and bake for 15-20 minutes each or until a toothpick comes out clean.

When you remove them from the oven, let them rest on the cooling rack, in the pan, for ten minutes. Then flip, cover, and stash them in the fridge to cool quickly. Once they have cooled begin the cake, butter cream icing, cake pattern. I have yet to 100% conquer how to "dirty ice" a cake but it is getting better. I guess my measurements were a little off so I have some layers that are thicker than others but I think it still turned out great. Here are the pictures!

I use Wiltons Icing Colors. I actually got them at Hobby Lobby with a 40% off coupon so they were very reasonable.

This is what it looks like with just the icing in between the layers.

This is what the cake turned out looking like.

This is what the cake looked like inside when they cut the first slice. I think it turned out great!