by Melissa – owner, lead buyer and creative director of Little Skye

Evie wanted a rainbow birthday party this year, which was far more elaborate than I had originally anticipated.   I started planning and collecting things for it about two months ago, and now that it’s finally over I thought I’d write a blog post about it in case it helps anyone planning anything similar.

The party was on a Saturday, so I baked the red velvet cake for the cake pops on Monday.  I have made a lot of cake pops and I definitely think they come out better when the cake sits for a few days in an airtight container.  On Thursday I made the cream cheese icing and the actual cake pops, since they stay great in the fridge for days in an airtight container.   I just used rainbow colored candy melts and sanding sugar.

 

On Friday I baked everything else including the six rainbow cake layers, which in my head was a lot easier than it was in reality.  I used a yellow cake recipe from Bakerella that I love because it’s really moist.  I do everything she suggests including wrapping the layers in plastic wrap to cool, and poking holes in the layers (with straws), then spraying them with sugar water.  Works great.  I thought one recipe would be enough since it makes three cakes, which I assumed should make six thinner cakes.  It wasn’t enough batter though, so I had to make a second batch, especially since one of the cakes somehow stuck to the pan.  So if you make a rainbow cake, I’d have extra ingredients on hand just in case you have to make another cake recipe.

I ran into problems only when I tried to level the cakes.  It was harder than I expected to get the same amount of batter in each pan, so they came out with different thicknesses.  Luckily they were all pretty flat, because they definitely have to be as flat as possible for this cake to work.  The trimming with a serrated knife was not as easy as it seemed.  Here is my result.  The yellow cake was still way too thick, but the rest ended up pretty even.  I just put a very thin layer of butter cream frosting between each cake, spread to the edges.  I actually used KAF frosting mix to make life slightly easier (the thicker recipe).

I went back and forth about whether or not to use supports, but in the end the cake didn’t need any.  I also went back and forth about whether or not to refrigerate the cake, since some recipes I read said it had to be refrigerated to set, but I ended up not putting it in the fridge at all for fear that it would dry out and that the icing would start to sweat.  That was a good call – it was in great shape the next morning just sitting in a (very tall) Tupperware cake container. The morning of the party I put the sugar flowers on it.

Now unfortunately I had to have this party at a party place since all of Evie’s friends do not live near us right now.  The party staff forgot to save a good piece of rainbow cake for me to photograph, so this is the best I had.  This slice missing a piece at the bottom, but most of the slices did end up looking pretty good.  And it tasted great which was a bonus because after five hours of making this thing, I was just hoping it would look the way she wanted it to look.

Here is a picture of the whole dessert table.  I was horrified by the green carpet on the wall (those of you who know me know just how much this bothered me), and by the horrible piece of furniture on which I had to put the food, but there wasn’t much I could do about it since I only had 30 minutes to set up, no paper for the wall, and a tablecloth that didn’t fit.  So alas, it was what it was.

Here are some more pictures of the food – rainbow sprinkle cookies, rainbow decorated marshmallows, rainbow cupcakes (the blue icing is supposed to be the sky), and rainbow fruit skewers.  Other food on the table not pictured below included rainbow swirl lollipops, rainbow Twizzlers, and rainbow popcorn.  I had to redo the cupcakes in the morning.  I should have known better, but I frosted them the night before and they did not keep well overnight.

 

I really liked the rainbow drinks, and so did the kids.  I just used Vitamin Water and Gatorade.   I also think these polka dot balloons are really cute.

 

Here are the kids having a great time.  As you can see, I’m not so great with flash photography.

 

And here are some of the presents.  I tried to have a different rainbow decoration on each one.  I found two really cute rainbow books which are in one of these packages: Elmer and the Rainbow and Little Pip and the Rainbow Wish.

I forgot to take pictures of the kids’ table, which was actually cute.  They each had a rainbow snack plate which consisted of strawberries, carrots, yellow cubes of cheese, green veggie Pirate’s Booty, blue potato chips, and purple bunches of grapes, with rainbow goldfish in rainbow dot cups in the middle of the plates.  They each also had a paper pinwheel and a party hat in alternating rainbow colors by their plates, and alternating colors of the polka dot balloons on their chairs.

And that pretty much sums up the rainbow party.  Evie and her friends really enjoyed it, so that made it all worth the effort.