.: the Leaning Tower of Rainbow Cake :.

We had a birthday in our house recently.  

On top of the two brownies I made for my oldest daughter to take into school (brownies made with Lindt chocolate are her absolute favourite), I thought I'd surprise her by making a rainbow layer cake for a family dinner.  I've seen a few different versions on Pinterest and loved them - so this is officially my first-ever baking-from-Pinterest effort.

Here's a peek at the moment of rainbow-emerging-Pinterest-nailed-it triumph ... and then we'll go back to the start.

{{wahooooo, we have rainbow!!}}

I initially planned to make a ginormous butter cake mix - but figured it would be quicker and easier to make packet mixes.  So I went with three Green's butter cake mixes + Queen's food colouring + the Vienna Cream icing recipe in the Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake book.  

So we started with this ...

And then went to this ... SIX bowls for washing up ... I used blue, green, yellow, rose pink, pillar box red and mixed the blue and pink to make a fairly dodgy looking purple.  I baked two cakes at a time, making sure to match up the two that came from the same packet-mix, just in case that happened to be important in a cake-y kind of way.

Next came this ... I had to do a bit of trimming to level off the cake-tops ... and in fact as it turned out, I should have done MORE trimming ...

... because we had the Leaning Tower of Rainbow Cake sitting in my kitchen.  Any fears of a cake-slide were solved by five skewers being inserted right down through the cake.  They of course poked out the top of the cake by a good inch, so I had to hide them ...

{{it's a thing of beauty isn't it - goes to show how much can be hidden with icing}}

... with a whole lot of little flags!  I love little cake-topper flags, and have a whole heap I've bought online from Lark.  Next came the Smartie + Malteser oh-so-artful decorating frenzy ...

The icing alone has 375 grams of butter in it.  I couldn't bring myself to push it to 500 grams by making another batch, so there were a few random uncovered bits of cake - which was a shame, as the cake was a surprise, and by the time dinner was over, the girls had totally guessed there was a rainbow looming ...

And done!!  The slices are so BIG!  It's like six pieces of cake in every slice.

Total nailed-it-Pinterest moment (let's forget about those fortifying skewers that were definitely holding back a cake-slide disaster), and absolutely worth the hours spent in the kitchen.  There will be more rainbow cakes in our future.  Hope your weekend is a good one so far.  xoxo cat