Rainbow Cake

Today was Lucy's third birthday, and I REALLY wanted to make a rainbow cake for her because I've seen so many seriously cute pictures of them online. The problem is, I don't know much about baking and/or cake decorating. Fortunately for me, my neighbor, Christine is great at it! She volunteered to help me make the toddler cake of my dreams (ok... so she basically did the whole thing, but I learned a whole lot watching her!).

First, she mixed one white box cake mix according the directions (you can certainly make it from scratch, but it saves a ton of time using a box mix), then weighed it and divided it by six. Using that number, she weighed out six equal portions of batter for the six layers, then put them into six bowls. Then we used gel dyes (not food coloring) to make the colors really saturated.

She baked each layer for nine minutes, then let them cool and started stacking them up with a layer of frosting in between.

I thought it would be really pretty and fun to put dum dums on the cake since Lucy is a big fan of lollipops. Christine had the idea to make a border all the way around the bottom, and I thought it would look pretty to do a graduated color pattern.

We left the sticks attached to the dum dums and just pushed them into the cake. Isn't it pretty?

Here's the top view:

Look how excited she is!

Ta Da!

It was SUPER sugary, but we made quite a dent in it.