Rainbow First Birthday Cake

You knew it was coming. My baby is turning one and it seemed most appropriate to make a rainbow cake.

 I've already written about the baking process in a seperate blog, so this will be the creation process.

First of all, I thought it would be helpful to see the process of making Swiss Meringue Buttercream.  First, you heat your egg whites and sugar in a double boiler in a metal bowl. You can also use glass, but skip the plastic. Heat it until the sugar is no longer grainy and the mixture is hot to the touch. Then take it off the heat.

 By the way, it's helpful to prepare your butter beforehand by cutting it into about tablespoon sized chunks. The butter should also be room temperature.

 After you remove your eggs and sugar from the heat, mix it for between 7 and 10 minutes until it basically turns into 7 minute frosting and is 100% room temperature. It should not be remotely warm anymore. And it should look something like this.

 Then add your butter a tablespoon at a time. Beat each one until completely incorporated. It should look something like this. However, this is much too runny to work as frosting.

 What's the trick? Keep beating! It takes 3-5 minutes of just beating after all the butter has been added until it thickens up and becomes frosting. It feels almost magical when it finally works. It should look something like this.

Yay! Our frosting is done! I chose Swiss Meringue Buttercream for the rainbow cake because it has so many layers and that much American buttercream would be cloyingly sweet. Swiss Meringue Buttercream would be the most pleasant to eat.

Now on to stacking the rainbow cake. I chose my decorated cake board a friend made for me with colored tissue paper and contact paper. Of course, start with purple.

 Fill with buttercream, add blue.

 Fill with buttercream and add green.

 Fill with buttercream and add yellow.

Fill with buttercream and add orange.

 Fill with buttercream and add red. Sometimes when I was filling I tried to keep the amount of buttercream to a minimum, but sometimes I was just trying to even out the layers, so not every layer had the same amount of buttercream.

After I had them stacked, I noticed not all the layers matched up perfectly, so I decided to shave off the sides to even them out and remove the last of the ugly carmelization.

 Next crumb coat and frost the cake.

 When I rolled the last of the white fondant from one package, I realized that not only was it not enough to cover the cake, it was much too little. I basically only covered the very top of the cake.

 No problem. I had another full package of white fondant. I rolled it to cover the sides and trimmed it to fit.

 It didn't show up well in the pictures, but I used fondant thinned with water to help hide the seams.

 I cut circles and letters out of every color of the rainbow. I used the colored circles to cover the awful seam, and to surround the bottom. I put the letters on the top as well as the number one.

Here's the view of the top.

I loved how it looked, but it needed something. So I made a handful of green caterpillars for the middle section.

Happy first birthday sweet baby!