Grace's 3rd Birthday Party

Well, with Grace's birthday party finally over for another year, I feel as though I can now relax a little.  I'm still not on top of housework and our sleep has continued to be very disrupted thanks to both girls having had head colds this past week and Sophie teething badly, but not having the pressure of a party (albeit a simple one) to put together, means this week will be much less stressful.

I kept Grace's birthday celebration as simple as I could and decided that my focus should be on the birthday cake.  After all, when I think back to my own birthday parties as a little girl, it's the cakes that I remember.  My Mum and mother-in-law also made a few dishes to help me out with the food.

The good old rainbow cake really was a bit of an experiment and I had all my fingers crossed that it would turn out in the end.  On Saturday evening as I was icing it, I honestly thought it hadn't turned out as well as I'd hoped.  I had already decided to just stick to four coloured layers to make things simpler (four was fiddly enough as it was) and so I bought yellow, green, pink and purple food colouring paste.  I also bought packet butter cake mix to make things easier still.  However, as I mixed in the purple, I suddenly wished I'd gone for blue instead as the purple looked shocking.  It was a real grey, sick looking shade and I hoped that perhaps once it had cooked, the colour might change and brighten up.  No such luck and so the purple layer found its way to the bin.  In the end though, my three layers was plenty high enough and I actually think any more would have been a bit too much.

For anyone on Pinterest or who blogs, a rainbow-style cake is a bit 'yesterday'.  But to my family who had never seen such a design, they were very impressed.  To make one like I did I used two packets of Green's Golden Butter Cake mix which I divided into four 8 inch round cake tins.  I doubled my recipe for buttercream frosting and so used 250g softened butter, 3 cups icing sugar and 4 tablespoons of milk and beat it for a very long time to get it nice and fluffy and smooth.  A palette knife helped ice the cake neatly.  This was exactly the right amount of icing for what I needed.  I layered the cake and iced it the night before, and kept it in an air tight container overnight.  To decorate the cake I just sprinkled hundreds and thousands on top and put Jaffas around the bottom edge.  If you like buttercream frosting, you will love this cake.  I'd like to try one with different shades of the same colour next.

Sitting down after the party yesterday afternoon, I was so happy with how it all went.  And while a lot of things I had planned didn't eventuate (rainbow tags for the favour bags, a 'rainbow' of helium balloons and a rainbow skirt for the birthday girl), it really was a perfect, simple, good old-fashioned birthday party.  The weather was gloriously sunny and warm, we had a good number of guests where I felt like I had the chance to speak to everyone, the cake was a hit and Grace enjoyed herself.