Rainbow Birthday Cake

Ok! So I'm not always the best at creative food-related projects. I tried those piñata cookies from Pinterest once-- Didn't quite work out. It might have had something to do with the fact that I tried to turn a cookie made with a sheep cookie-cutter into a donkey. But that's besides the point.

This little creative endeavor I am SO proud of! Back in March it was Eryn's (You know Eryn, she's the fabulous designer that I've mentioned before! Feel free to check her stuff out here!) birthday and I wanted to make her something fabulous to celebrate. I saw a picture of a crazy colorful birthday cake and about fainted-- It was perfect!

Now I'm not going to lie, this takes a lot of time and a lot of patience for someone who is not a skilled cake decorator (me), but it was so worth it! Here's my step-by-step instructions if you want to make your own :)

You'll need:

• 2 boxes of cake mix
• 4 containers of icing (3 have to be vanilla)
• Food coloring
• 6 sandwich-sized plastic bags or icing bags
• Star decorating tip (any size, depends on how large you wants the stars)

1. Bake 2 (2-layer) cakes, any cakes, per the instructions. You'll want to have 4 layers total when you are finished. Of course you can use less to make a smaller cake but 4 (8 inch) layers will give you the size above. I chose to mix it up and used both chocolate and funfetti!
   
   
   
   
   
2. After the cakes are done cooling, level them. You can do this using a knife (which never works out well for me) or this fun leveling tool. This will make them sit flat when you stack them and you will have cake pieces to snack on!
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Stack the 4 layers, putting icing in between each as you go. Do your best to make sure the cake edges are even with each other. If you have any small holes from the cake sticking to the pan, don't worry-- Just patch them up with icing!
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. Use the vanilla icing and food coloring to mix whichever colors you want for the stars. You will need about 1/2 of a standard sized icing container for each color. I used the neon food coloring that you can find in the baking isle to get the 6 bright colors!
   
   
   
   
   
5. When finished mixing, put your icing into the icing bags with the star tip. You will probably need to refrigerate the bags for about 20 minutes to stiffen the icing a little.
   
   
6. Start icing with the first 2 colors! I chose to do 2 colors at a time, to prevent having to rotate between all 6 bags at once (and I only had 2 star tips of the same size). I simply started with one star of each color next to one another and left an adequate space to fill in the other 4 colors between each of the sets.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
7. Repeat with all colors.
   
   
   
   
   
8. After using all of the colors, go back and fill in any spaces with a random color. You'll especially need to do this on top. I way underestimated how many of each color to put on the top of the cake the first time around. Filling in spaces will also make the cake color look random, as opposed to a pattern.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
9. Cut & enjoy!

Happy Friday :)