{ somewhere over the cake }

It's official.

The internet is bad for my emotional stability.

See, a few weeks ago, a blogger named Lori, who writes the very fabulous In Pursuit of Martha Points, tweeted about this cake she had made for her daughter's birthday. 

The one she saw made on the Martha Stewart Show by The Whisk Kid's Kaitlin Flannery.

The one that I was now compelled to make.

The Rainbow Cake.

{ insert foreboding music here }

I couldn't get it out of my head. The smooth, white icing. The jewel-toned layers. The fact that between the two components, there is enough butter used to keep your local dairy farm in business for the next year, and also enough butter to make Paula Dean cry.

This was more than a cake.

This was a commitment.

And I was all in.

I picked this past Saturday as Rainbow Cake Day. Never mind that the past week was crazed with Oscar's surgery and recovery, catching up on the house and family after my trip out of town, hosting a little spa party for some of the women in my community, and having some neighbors over to dinner to get some insight on preschool selection.

Never mind that MacGyver kept shooting me the side eye and asking why I just can't ever relax. 

That cake was being made.

And so I began, using The Whisk Kid's cake and frosting recipe.

Including all 19 egg whites and 8 sticks of butter.

I was not quite as precise as my inspiration bakers. When it came down to splitting up the cake batter into six portions for coloring and baking, I relied not on a kitchen scale, but on an age-old technique called "eyeballing it", in which I scooped similarly-sized spoonfuls of batter into bowls until each bowl looked "about right."

It worked.

And so, two at a time, I baked off a total of six thin layers of rainbow-colored cake.

While they cooled, I mixed up the first batch of frosting.

I'm going to go ahead and suggest you actually make three batches, not two, as Kaitlyn suggests. Because it just tastes that good. I honestly could have sat with that bowl and a spatula in the corner and hung out for the rest of the day, completely happy. 

Now you know.

With shaking hands, I filled and stacked my layers.

I think that's when I took my first breath of the day.

I crumb coated (Which MacGyver believes means to coat the cake in graham cracker crumbs. Silly man.) and then mixed up the second batch of swiss meringue buttercream.

To frost the cake for reals.

So innocent, so simple.

And then.

Ka-chow.

This really could not be more beautiful.

Or delicious. Nine out of ten toddlers agree.

It was one of the more tedious cakes I've made, but it was well worth it, and I feel quite proud of myself for pulling it off. It's not a project for the faint of heart (or for those concerned in the least about their arteries), but I'm so glad Lori tweeted me into it. :)

And now. Now I'm just going to do full disclosure. We're mostly moms and parents, right? We're prepared for just about anything. Aren't we?

I'm not going to get too super specific, here, so please follow along. There is A  LOT of gel food coloring in this cake. It's necessary to get those brilliant pops of gorgeous color. 

However, what goes in must come out. So please do not be alarmed when what comes out is slightly more colorful than you might expect.