Jenny's birthday cake

This is my baby girl.

She turned 11 last month and now she looks like this.

I love this girl.  She amazes me.  I can't figure her out most days and I think that's how she likes it.  From the day she was born she has known exactly who she is.  I love many things about this girl but that is my favorite.  She's not easily influenced and as we enter middle school next year I pray that quality remains strong.  Stay strong baby girl, stay strong!!

We had to have a party of course and we decided to have an art party!  I love a good theme and we ran with it!  My friend Jill's daughter Reagan came and painted with the girls and they had a great time.  Jenny and I always like to bake her cake together and this year we decided the rainbow cake we've all seen on Pinterest was the perfect cake!

Here is the finished product.

And here is the inside.

This was not a hard cake to make.  It was however a very time consuming cake to make!  My advice?  Buy 2 or 3 cake pans.  We only had one so it took a long time!  We had fun though!

We started with a basic white cake recipe which we doubled.  We used an 8 inch cake pan.  We colored a small amount of batter using gel colors, not liquid food coloring.  You can get gel colors at any craft store in the cake section.  We then poured about an inch of batter into the well greased pan and baked it for about 10 minutes.  We ended up with lots of these!

We ended up with seven total.  My daughter is very organized and she likes things in the right place and order.  Yes she's just 11.  As a result please notice from top to bottom the order of the cake.

The orangey looking layer second from the top is actually pink which I convinced her could substitute for indigo.  Therefore our cake is in perfect ROY G. BIV order.  Can you say OCD?

Anyway, we used plain white buttercream in between the layers.  Obviously we needed more between some layers to make things nice and flat and even.
We then covered the whole thing in buttercream and made the banner and added the large gumdrops which we bought at the party store.

And voila!

Excuse the dishtowel and the mess behind the cake.  It was LATE!!

Here are some scenes from the party!

The artist table all set up

Jenny and our friend Reagan.

The masterpieces!

It was a really fun party and as hard as it can be to see them get big it really is a joy to watch them grow. They sat around and talked and giggled and painted and thankfully did not talk about boys just yet!  So far 11 has been great!

And in case you were wondering, in between the two pictures above she looked like this.

Be still my heart!  Love that girl!