Posted by Virginia French

Thank you to everyone who came to Audrey and Camille’s birthday party last month.  We were so lucky to get such a beautiful day and having all of our friends there made our family so incredibly happy.  A lot of people have been asking me where I got the food for the party.  I made it!  So I have a confession, I am absolutely obsessed with making any type of food myself.  In fact, I feel guilty every time we order takeout a home (yeah, I know its a sickness).  Is it also weird that my daughter didn’t know that soup came out of cans?

We came up with the rainbow theme because Audrey loves Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony.  But since the party was also for Camille I wanted to make it about rainbows.  And of course the first thing I did was think of all the rainbow themed foods I wanted to make.  And no, we don’t have 30 tiny chairs.  I called a local party rental place for most of the furniture at the party.  Here are some photos from the party and scroll down for the recipes.

Rainbow Rice Krispies This I really can’t call a recipe.  I just made rice krispies using the recipe on the box.  The only thing I did was I added the food coloring while the marshmallows and butter were melting.  That way when the rice krispies were added the color distributed evenly.  Then I pressed it into a pan and did the same thing for the next 5 layers. Rainbow jello This one, like the rainbow rice krispies was also an assembly job.  I bought 6 different boxes of jello made the first layer, let that refrigerate and poured the second layer on top and let that refrigerate and so on.  I really wanted to make my own jello, but I ran out of time.

Giant Rainbow Cupcakes  I used the recipe I found from Allrecipes.com for Buttermilk pound cake, which can be found here.  Half the recipe from this site to make enough batter for one giant cupcake.

Tips for baking giant cupcakes:

Baking mold – For giant cupcakes I found giant silicone baking molds are the easiest to use.  I’ve tried other pans and they work out just fine, but the silicone mold makes it easier for the cake to pop out. I also like to use the molds that have a separate top.  Since the top part of the cupcake has such a shorter cooking time its easier to take it out before the bottom half is done.  For this cake I only used the bottom half of the mold and just used a ton of frosting to make the top.

Must use pound cake! -I t’s also very important that you use ONLY a pound cake recipe.  If you use regular cake it will burn on the outside while being almost raw in the inside.

Rainbow color – For the rainbow part I separated the cake batter into 6 separate bowls and dyed each one a different color.  Then I layered the colored batter on top of each other in the order of a rainbow.  While the cupcake bakes the color that you place on the bottom rises creating the effect in the picture.

Food coloring – I use AmeriColor food coloring.  I find that their dyes do an excellent job of getting you that really rich deep color.