Fancy Birthday Cake

It's my dear friend Charlie's 25th birthday so I wanted to make him a special birthday cake. I rarely go on Pinterest, but there are fancy cakes all over the place. I love the look of the ombre cakes - where there are like 8 layers inside going from one shade gradually lighter, lighter, lighter. I saw this one and thought I could try to copy it, but make it a little easier. I loved the look of the sprinkles all over the outside. I opted for just three layers, and a simpler color scheme - red, orange, yellow. I think everyone liked it!

Ingredients:
2 boxes white cake mix (and whatever they require)
2 containers frosting
Food die
Rainbow nonpareil sprinkles


Directions:
Mix the batter as recommended on the box. Divide it evenly into three bowls and color each one. You can do whatever colors you want, or separate it more and do rainbow colors - whatever you want! For simplicity, I just did three. (It is the middle of the week.)

Butter and flour a 9 inch cake pan (or three if you have more than one) and bake according to the directions. Remove from the oven and cool, and slice off the rounded top so it's flat and level. (And snack on the cake if you want.) Do that with each bowl of batter and let them cool completely.

Spread jam or frosting (I used raspberry jam) in between the layers of cake and stack them up. Trim around the edges if you need to make it more even.

Take about half of the frosting out of one of the containers and put it in a small bowl. Add a few tablespoons of water to thin it a little, then apply a crumb coat. (This is a thin layer of frosting covering the whole cake and making all the crumbs stick to the cake and not in your icing.) Put it in the fridge until the icing is totally dry - fine to leave it overnight.

Then smoothly ice the whole thing with the remaining frosting.

Now the sprinkles. I put the cake (on a plate) into a box to catch any stray sprinkles - these things roll everywhere. Then just shake them out all around and gently pat them into the frosting to stick.

Neaten up the messy edges of the plate and serve it with some birthday candles - I chose animal print candles because we were on our way to a party at the Central Park Zoo.

Happy Birthday Charlie!