Rainbow Cake

Birthday time always brings so much excitement to our house! Each year my daughter picks out her own birthday cake. She LOVES to choose every detail of the cake: the batter, icing, decorations, shape, and candles. Then she changes her mind a thousand times. :-) This led us to our beautiful, unexpected, rainbow cake!
My daughter and I went to the store to choose the type of cake she would have for her birthday. We saw everything from rainbow chip to marble to five different types of chocolate. After standing in the aisle for at least ten minutes, she chose a white cake. I was shocked! I asked if she was sure she wanted it. She said yes.
Well......the next day we got ready to make her cake. I got out the cake mix and she was devastated. She was convinced that she did NOT choose a white cake mix. This quickly turned to sheer joy when we decided to venture into the unknown to create a rainbow cake!

Supplies Needed:

White cake mix

Food coloring

Pan of your choosing

Lots of spoons and cups!

Optional: white frosting, jelly beans, and mini marshmallows

Directions:

Make the cake batter as directed on the back of the box. Divide the batter into cups according to the number of colors you are going to use. Add 3 drops of food coloring to each cup of batter. Add more to get desired colors. (I mixed red and yellow to get orange.)

Grease pan as directed on cake box. Pour batter into the pan. At this point your child is probably beginning to get very excited. My daughter loved pouring the different colors into the pan.

Use a knife to swirl the rainbow colors. The best techniques is to make sure the knife is not lifted up at all. Just keep swirling. Also, be sure the knife is touching the bottom of the pan. The excitement peaked here for my birthday girl as I let her mix the colors under very close supervision.

Bake cake as directed. You will want to check on the cake early, as it may bake quickly. A small amount of batter is lost when it is transferred from bowl to cup to pan. Therefore, your baking time will most likely be shorter than average.

My daughter chose to make her rainbow cake into a treasure chest. However, you could easily make your cake into the rainbow cake pictured below. Just add jellybeans (I used Starburst) and mini marshmallows. As you can see my daughter enjoyed decorating this cake herself!

Perfect for a rainbow birthday or St. Patrick's Day!

(The rainbow cake batter was my own idea. The jellybean and marshmallow cake decorations were inspired by Family Fun. http://familyfun.go.com/recipes/catch-a-rainbow-cake-687429/ )

Chocolate Covered Strawberries/Footballs

When I was asked to bring something for my family's Superbowl party, I immediately went to Pinterest for ideas. I am someone that has to bring something cute to parties!

Since strawberries were on sale at Sentry for $2.50, I bought a container of them. (I always am skeptical if I am getting my true 16oz of strawberries since I worked at a grocery store where they would pick out the rotten ones and still sell the containers minus one or two strawberries.)

Needless, I bought a container and decided to make chocolate covered strawberries football style.

Recipe:

1 container strawberries
1/2 bag chocolate chips
1/5 bag white chocolate chips

Melt chocolate chips. Dip strawberries so just the greens are showing. Set on wax paper. Wait until dry.

Melt white chocolate chips. Scoop melted chocolate into baggie and slit the corner to get a slim hole. Put a straight line down the middle and then three lines across.

Once dry, put them on a fancy plate and enjoy! (Note: I am not a perfectionist with the lines.) :-)

I had leftover white chocolate chips so I took out some pretzels and drizzled them. My husband got to them before I could get a picture. This was all that was left!