About a year ago I was busy planning a 1st Birthday Party for my baby. I couldn’t believe he was already a whole year old and I wanted to make sure his birthday was special. Or at least looked cute in the pictures. Because, really, what baby remembers their first birthday?

I knew this was probably the one year where I could choose a theme based on what I liked, so I chose rainbow colors! The party itself was kept pretty simple – just family, and cake, and presents. But the colors made it cheerful and fun. I thought I’d just share a few of the things we did.

The Decor

The decorations were very simple. Just several different colors of streamers hung around the house. Hanging the streamers straight down across a blank wall made for a really nice photo backdrop.

The Activity

I felt like we needed some kind of activity other than opening presents, so I decided we’d try finger painting. There are all kinds of edible finger paint recipes around the web. I think we used this one from The Imagination Tree.  Putting each color in a clear plastic cup made it pretty on the table and also easy to clean up when we were done. This was Charlie’s first attempt at painting of any kind, so I wasn’t sure how it would go. After tasting it and realizing that while edible, it wasn’t actually tasty, he started to paint a little. I think my sisters and I had more fun with it than he did though.

The Cake

The cake was really my crowning achievement. I had seen all kinds of cute rainbow cakes on Pinterest and wasn’t sure if I could pull it off, but it came together quite nicely and wasn’t actually that complicated!

You start with a box of white cake mix. I guess if you know how to make white cake from scratch you could do that too, but a box works just as well. Mix it up according to the directions and then divide up the mix into six small bowls. Use food coloring (the gel kind works best – or so I hear) to make each bowl a different color.

From there you can bake each color separately and stack them into a nice and neat layer cake. Or you can do what I did and pour them all in together. You want to carefully pour three colors in one round cake pan and three in another. I found it worked best to just pour straight into the middle of the pan, one color on top of the other. Don’t stir the batter around or you’ll mix the colors too much. Then pop them in the oven according to the package directions.

Once the cake is baked you can layer the two sections and top with icing. I used a fluffy whipped topping (once again, from a package) and covered the top with rainbow sprinkles.

When you cut into the cake, you could see each color. My method didn’t result in perfectly straight layers, but I still thought the multi-colored effect was nice.

And it tasted delicious.

This year’s birthday party is going to be all about cars. I hope to share some of the things I’m planning in a few weeks!