Tutorial: Rainbow Layer Cake

Easy rainbow cake is all well and good and pretty special (if you're looking for my easy rainbow cake tutorial, by the way, good luck--Blogger crashed last week and lost it. They're supposed to be manually reposting the stuff they lost, but if they don't, expect a bare bones re-do next week), but if you need a dessert that's not just regular special, but very, very, VERY special--say, for a fifth birthday party, for example--then a rainbow layer cake is where you want to go. Yes, it's more work and it takes longer, but it's not actually any harder than the easy rainbow cake.

And it looks AWESOME.

To start the rainbow layer cake, mix up a double-batch of white cake. I don't care if you make your batter from scratch or use a boxed mix, but I do care that you mix up WHITE cake, not yellow. You'll get the best results with your dye by using white cake.

Preheat your oven and grease as many 8" round cake pans as you own. I own two, but if you borrow even just a couple more than that, you'll make this process a LOT easier. You can also make this layer cake with pans of different shapes and sizes, but then you'll have to experiment with baking time.

Scoop one cup of cake batter into a separate bowl, and dye it one color. It's most efficient to bake your layers in reverse rainbow order--you'll be building your cake from the bottom up, so if you bake violet and indigo first, then you can get started while red and orange are still cooling. I let all my layers cool overnight, though, so I dye and bake them in whatever order I feel like, so please yourself.

Scrape the one cup of dyed batter into its own cake pan, and use the back of a spoon to smooth it out over the bottom of the pan:

And yes, that store-brand butter-flavored pan spray does make me gag at the fake butter scent whenever I use it. Blame Matt for buying it, because the man has no sense in the grocery store.

Bake these super-thin cake layers for approximately 15 minutes (you probably know if your oven cooks on the fast or the slow side, but if you don't, check on it after about 12 minutes), and let them cool completely.

When you're ready to decorate, melt white chocolate (harder to use) or white candy coating (also in the baking aisle and easier to use, although the ingredients are all total crap for you). You can use a double-boiler or the microwave, but my method of choice, which I also use for building gingerbread houses, is a fondue pot:

The big benefit of using white chocolate or candy coating over frosting is that it dries hard. You have a lot of slidey layers here, and you want them to stack neatly and perfectly all right on top of each other. How do you best do that?

Glue them!

Put a dab of melted white chocolate down on the cake plate, then rest your bottom cake layer on top of that. Spread melted chocolate all over the top of that layer, then stack your next cake layer on top, and so on and so on:

Decorate the top of your cake however you wish. I used the last of the white chocolate, dyed it pink right in the fondue pot, then spread it over the top and doused it in rainbow sprinkles:

I like to leave the sides unfrosted so that you can see the rainbow, but it's easy to frost the sides if you'd rather keep the rainbow a surprise.

It looks beautiful now, but when you cut into it, that's when everyone gets really excited, because I hate to brag on myself, but it is kind of the coolest thing ever:

Birthday Girl agrees:

Goodness, life just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it?

Giveaway: Win a One-Month Subscription to Green Kid Crafts

The little girls loved spending the last week as my "official reviewers," putting together all the craft kits that they scored for my write-up of Green Kid Crafts over at Crafting a Green World:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I'm also mediating a give-away from Green Kid Crafts--run over and enter (up to four times!) and then you and your kiddos can play, too!

Stamping the Stars

Draw the stars:

 

Have the Momma cut out the stars.

Add paint:

 

The full tutorial for our hand-drawn, hand-carved rubber stamps is over at Crafting a Green World. Normally, I use the rubber stamp carving blocks to carve stamps for myself, simple shapes such as the ones that I use for gift bags, but the girls had so much fun drawing stamps for themselves that I may soon teach Willow, at least, how to use a linoleum cutter so that she can do her own rubber stamps from start to finish.

3D Wooden Puzzles for Studying Birds and Fish

My aunt gave Matt a few of those 3D wooden puzzles for Christmas, but before he could get to them all by himself, the little girls griped and griped and griped that THEY wanted to put them together, too!

Coincidentally, we've been playing around with unit studies in our homeschool (in an unschool-y sort of way, if that makes any sense), and thus Willow was studying the ocean that week, and Sydney was studying butterflies.

Coincidentally, one wooden puzzles was of an adult and baby penguin, and the other was of an angelfish. The day's unit study activity is therefore set!

It's good that these were meant to be a "together" sort of activity, because these 3D wooden puzzles are a little too hard for a six-year-old to work independently, and a LOT too hard for a five-year-old to work independently.

You do, however, get to use the "good" glue:

For some reason the girls HATE Elmer's glue, and only want to use Aleene's. I respect the opinion, but we have a flat-out ton of Elmer's hanging around, so until that's used up...suck it up, I guess.

I'm loving this activity as an exercise in reading a somewhat complicated diagram:

And yes, Willow is wearing a ton of make-up.

The angelfish comes together with a little help--

--and a lot of glue:

Phew!

The penguin and the angelfish now have spots of honor on high shelves in the girls' bedroom. What with all the models and kits and other various projects that we've been doing lately, we may have to add an entire trophy room onto our house soon!

The penguins:
The angelfish:

Birthday Waffles are Pink and Blue

On the morning of her fifth birthday (Fifth!!! FIFTH!!!), Sydney requested waffles for breakfast.

But oh, no--not just any waffles!

 Five-year-old Sydney wanted pink and blue waffles.

To make, mix up your favorite waffle batter, substituting organic white flour for the usual white whole wheat amount. Divide the batter into two bowls, and color each half separately, whatever color you choose.

Get out two ladles or measuring cups with handles, and scoop one color of batter into one cup, and the other color of batter into another. With one cup of batter in each hand, pour them at the same time into your waffle maker, swirling the colors or simply making them go halfsies:

 When you're finished, you'll have a nice, warm stack of two-toned waffles:

 And the birthday girl will pronounce her birthday breakfast a complete success.

FIVE. Can you even believe it?

Swimming

Sure, we didn't get to stay in Florida long enough to see the space shuttle launch (and nope, we're not going back for it, either, else we'd miss our theater date for "A Year with Frog and Toad").

We did see the shuttle on the launch pad, however, which is at least one dream come true.

We built sandcastles.

We spent hours listening to books together in the car (that reminds me that, now that we're back at our home public library, Willow needs the rest of those Kingdom Keepers books!).

We learned a LOT about seashells.

We learned that we do NOT like outlet malls.

We ate authentic key lime pie (dream come true!).

And somehow, in the hours every single day that we spent at beaches on both sides of the peninsula and at pools in every single hotel and motel we stayed at on our trip, both of my girls became pretty good swimmers. Considering that Willow only learned to swim with struggling strokes in the middle of last summer, and Sydney only taught herself those same struggling strokes this winter, this is no mean feat.

Sydney can swim with her face in the water (I cannot do this):


She can tread water (I CAN do this, but not so fancy):


She can swim on her back (nope, not me), and Willow, who I watched practice this over and over and over again day after day after day on our vacation, can perform the unimaginable-to-me act of diving underwater and TOUCHING THE BOTTOM OF THE POOL:


Thank goodness we're homeschoolers. Thank goodness that in the two weeks that we were gone, we didn't "miss" school, but instead did some of the best learning that we've done all year.

Thank goodness for audiobooks.

Thank goodness for ocean documentaries and Bill Nye and Space Buddies.

Thank goodness for sand, and buckets and shovels to dig and carry and sculpt with.

Thank goodness for swimming.

But most of all, thank goodness for being home! We've jumped right back in again, with gardening and painting and the baking of sweet cornbread. We have a birthday party coming up, which means rainbow cake, and an international fair next month, and just this afternoon I bought the girls a beginner's chemistry set.

Thank goodness for chemistry sets is what I HOPE I'll be saying soon!

In Dinosaur World

I've always wanted to take the girls to Dinosaur World in Kentucky, but it's just far enough from here to make it a little too long for a day trip, and a little too short for an overnight expedition.

However, it turns out that right off the highway, on the drive from Ft. Myers back to Orlando, is where Dinosaur World Florida lives!

There's fossil digging, a playground, a museum, a gift shop (from which Willow now proudly sports a Dinosaur World baseball cap), and other such niceness, but the big draw to Dinosaur World is the hiking--there are many, MANY dinosaur statues to walk by:

Willow took a photograph of every single dinosaur that she saw. She was that excited. I took some photos of Willow taking photos, but every shot that she's not in is one of her own:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Oh, yes, there ARE some bloody ones:

And that's just a drop in the bucket of the 147 dinosaur photos that Willow shot that day. If you want to see the rest, invite yourself over to take a look at her dinosaur scrapbook--it's becoming quite the masterpiece.