Nyan Cat Cake Saga

Note to self: never, ever, EVER ask your soon-to-be five year old what kind of cake she wants for her birthday. You'll get a response like, "ummmm a Nyan Cat Rainbow Cake!"

A what?!?!

Soooo...off to Pinterest I went, and I found a few different cakes that would fit my kid's pretty tall order. Ultimately I decided on mashing a couple of ideas together - this one and this one were my go-to images.

I decided to build a 6 layer cake and make each layer a different color of the rainbow - don't worry, I cheated and used a white box cake mix. 

Following the instructions, I mixed the ingredients to make 2 boxes of white cake mix. Using a 1 cup measure, I divided the batter into 6 bowls. I highly recommend using gel food coloring to tint your batter (and the massive amounts of buttercream you'll use to frost this monster) - you will get a much brighter color. After tinting, I went ahead and baked the cakes in 9 inch cake pans for about 13 minutes or so. It helps to have your mom there to stick her hand in the hot oven and touch the burning hot cake with her bare hand to test if done because you're too much of a wuss  busy with other things.

While the cakes cool, make a butt load of buttercream - seriously, I went through like, 3 and a half pounds of powdered sugar. The buttercream recipe I use is pretty simple:

• 2 sticks butter, softened
• a few tablespoons milk
• a few splashes of vanilla
• 4 cups of powdered sugar

Of course, I tripled these numbers...because more frosting = more fun. Just cream the butter in a stand mixer and slowly add powdered sugar, adding milk and vanilla to loosen it up as necessary. I set a small amount aside to tint different colors for the Nyan Cat's rainbow, and used the plain white to frost between each cake layer, plus a crumb coat on the outside. For the very top layer of frosting, I went with a bright sky blue.

To decorate the cake, I used a cherry pop-tart for the body, then free-handed the Nyan Cat's face, paws, and tail in gray buttercream. The facial details had to be done using store bought gel icing (so sue me), and the rainbow coming out of his butt was done in rainbow tinted buttercream.

The best part is when you slice into this bad boy...

Total shock and awe....as well it should have been  - this thing took me hours!!!!

Lesson learned.