Tea Time: Rainbow Cake and Origami Butterflies: Keila's Birthday Party

While it's fresh, I'm going to post a few pics from Keila's birthday party yesterday. The theme was a rather loose rainbow butterfly combo, mostly because when I asked Keila what she wanted, she agreed to any and all options presented including 'purple', 'blue', 'animals' and 'pretty'. So there you go.
The rainbow cake turned out to be both harder and easier than expected. I got the idea off the Martha Stewart website (http://www.marthastewart.com/256688/rainbow-cake) but used a basic white cake recipe and didn't stick with the recommended filling or frosting recipes, either. After all, who wants to use 19 (yes NINETEEN) eggs in total when baking a cake? Not me. Plus, we were avoiding dairy and soy for one of our guests, so I substituted oat milk for cow's milk and non-hydrogenated margarine for butter. (Question: how do they make margarine without hydrogenating the oil? I probably don't want to know, right? Am guessing it's still not incredibly healthy).
The cake recipe is here: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/nanys-white-cake/ I have to say, for a plain white cake, it turned out really well, quite tasty!
For the frosting, I used this recipe: http://www.thekitchenmagpie.com/vegan-buttercream-icing-recipe   Seeing as I was frosting and filling a 6-layer cake, I doubled the frosting recipe, using the UK's Sunflower Pure Margarine. Also found that I didn't need any rice milk to thin out the frosting, either. And I didn't use quite as much powdered sugar as they called for. But it was still a LOT of sugar!
So, baking the cake itself wasn't really difficult, just time-consuming to divide up the batter, color it, and then bake it in six different pans. All of the colors came out great, besides the red. I used red gel food coloring too, so not sure why it wasn't stronger? Anyone? Anyway, it was still pretty.
The problems began while I was frosting and stacking the layers. I'd left the layers on parchment paper and just flipped each one over onto the growing stack after frosting the layer below. All was going well until....the layers started sliding around like greased hockey pucks!! AHHHHHH! Had completely forgotten that margarine isn't as dense as butter and therefore softens up much faster at room temperature. I managed to get the layers all stacked up, but the whole cake was doing a good impression of the Leaning Tower of Pisa by then. I hurried and shoved it into the fridge (at which point it toppled over and came to rest against a container of almond milk; imagine the sounds emanating from our kitchen at that point!!). I had thankfully reserved a lot of frosting in another bowl (also put in the fridge) for the next morning, hoping that the cake could be fixed.
12 hours later...I pulled the cake out, shoved the layers somewhat back into place, and skewered them into place with 2 chop sticks. Topped the chopsticks with butterflies, frosted over the mess as best I could, and added more origami butterflies to try and conceal the damage. All this really did was make a rather tacky butterfly/leaning cake mess, but it was the best I could manage with the time that was left!
So....ready to completely write off the stupid rainbow cake (even though Keila yelled 'PRETTY' upon seeing it)...imagine my surprise upon cutting it. Perfect rainbow layers inside!
Lesson learned....just cut the cake and don't show it to anyone before serving individual slices. Or use real butter and refrigerate the frosting in between each layer!
   As for the origami butterflies: they're quite easy to make and very cute for a child's party. I used them as decor and also as toppers for the party favors. Click on this link if you want the step-by-step tutorial: http://goorigami.com/single-sheet-origami/origami-butterfly/3006
Finally, for a craft, I had the kids (with mom's help) glue strips of pastel rainbow paper onto pre-cut clouds. They then topped the clouds with cotton balls for a fluffy realistic effect. Or they just ate the cotton balls and/or licked the glue.

I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking!

                       Lopsided Butterfly Rainbow Cake