Ava's Third Birthday - Part 2: The Cake

I had been dying to make this cake for Ava's birthday. I read about it on one of my favorites blogs, whatever, and filed it away for future reference. The "it" cake. And I must be really on trend, because I just saw that the cake was featured on the Urban Outfitters blog a couple of days ago. Who says I'm not a cool mom? So here's our journey to our rainbow birthday cake:

We waited until we went to Utah this past weekend to make it. That way, all of our other family members could help eat it and we wouldn't get stuck with all of the leftovers.

Ava wanted to help. She dumped in the ingredients, and she chose the colors and the order that we made them.

Elliott's dad generously documented our progress for posterity's sake.

We settled on five layers. Why five? Since we could only muster up five cake pans, that's why.

red, yellow, blue, green, purple

Voila! I only used one cake mix and just put about 1 cup of colored batter into each pan. The layers were so thin, but they puffed up a bit in the cooking.

All five layers together. If I were a professional, I would have trimmed the tops of the layers so they didn't dome up like that. But honestly, the layers were so thin I was afraid I would take half the cake off if I did that, so no-go.

Step one of icing: the crumb coat

Ta-da!

Ava's first slice

The inside

Isn't that pretty?

I love this cake! But how does it taste?

Well, Ava likes it....

.... and Lily likes it...

... so I say it's a hit!