Bright Birthday

So, my baby sister, Alexis, turned 29 last week. A bunch of us met at a local tapas restaurant for dinner, followed by cake at a nearby girlfriend's house. After cake, the younger girls headed out for a night of dancing.

* Decoupaged letters made by Jenn to decorate the patio at the restaurant *

So, back to that bit about the cake. After seeing the birthday party and cake made by the uber-creative Andrea for her daughter, I just had to do something similar for Lex's big day. I just knew that all of those bright colors would absolutely delight her.

I started by picking up some gel food coloring in bright shades of purple, pink blue and green, two boxes of cake mix (yes, I cheated!), and a couple of cans of icing.

From these I made four 8" layers and added a different color to each layer. I left them to cool overnight and woke up early the next morning to start frosting and assembling the cake.

Let me just say that now I totally understand the importance of leveling the layers for your cake! It took me three cans of frosting (had to make a run to the store for more!) to fill in the spaces between the layers and cover it all.

Of course, it was all liberally topped with glittery sprinkles. I stuck in 8 short skewers to help hold it all together, then several longer skewers to keep the plastic wrap off the frosting. It was all then packed into the car.

The plan was that I would take the cake to work with me, and then Megan, our evening's hostess, would pick it up from me there and take it to her place. On the way to work, I watched out of the corner of my eye as the cake gradually started leaning, leaning, leaning. I'm not sure how, but I managed to get it into the back room of the store without it totally falling to pieces. As the leaning continued and fissures started to show in the top layer, I started to get really panicky.

*Hopefully all of those sparkles disguise some of the lean!*

Fortunately, Megan saved the day. She took the cake home. Made her best effort to straighten the cake, scooped some of the frosting that had oozed out from between the layers into the fissures on the top, added even more sprinkles, and got the whole thing into her fridge. (Thank you again, Megan! Have I mentioned how awesome you are?!)

*I may have got trick candles*

And Lex? She was completely blown away when the cake was open. You should have heard her squeals of delight! Like she was a little girl again. It was fantastic! All that work? Totally worth it!

Taa Daa!!! I don't think the photo really captures the intensity of the colors, but there you go...