Rainbow Cake

A few weeks ago we had a family get together for Miss 8's birthday. She requested a Rainbow cake. Now I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with birthday cakes. I have made quite a few over the years and I've had some that turned out ok and some more interesting one's. Unfortunately (fortunately!), I don't have photo's to show you. I found this cake on Pinterest and Miss 8 loved it!

                                 

We both fell in Love instantly. 

After falling in love with it, the 1st thing that I noticed was that it was made with fondant icing. I've never used fondant icing, but here's the thing, although I think it looks great, It just doesn't have the same amazing taste that butter cream icing has. Mmmm mmm butter cream!! I knew that I wouldn't be able to roll butter cream icing, so just decided to wing it and see how it turned out. 

For the general instructions on how to make the cake, I followed the recipe and the photos from this site  -http://www.tablespoon.com/recipes/rainbow-pinata-cake/5795d355-a6a5-4030-

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However, here is what I did differently:

*I used 2 butter packet cake mixes for the cakes, just making them up as per their instructions on the packet. I just used the cheapest ones from the supermarket, which cost 80cents each. 

*I filled the inside of the cake with M&M's only.

*I used butter cream icing both for sticking the layers together and for the decorating. 

I made up 4 batches at once with this recipe:

125g Butter

1 1/2 cups of icing sugar

1 Tbls milk

Leave the butter to soften at room temperature, then beat together with the icing sugar and 1 tablespoon of milk, until smooth and light in colour.

Once made up, take half of the icing mixture and colour it sky blue. Then cover the entire cake in this colour. Once covered, smooth over with a knife. If the icing sticks to the knife, dip it in a glass of boiling water and continue the process until the cake is all smooth. 

This picture is before the smoothing out process.

Next, divide the remaining icing into 5 separate bowls, colouring each bowl of icing with the desired colour. I used red, yellow, pink, green & purple.

Next, take a piping bag with your desired piping nozzle attached. Fill with red icing and starting from the bottom left hand corner, slowly sqeeze dots of icing onto the cake. Repeat the process until you have followed the top of the rainbow down to the bottom right corner. Follow up with a 2nd line. 

Repeat the process with the leftover colours, as seen in this picture, until you have finished.

You can use 1 piping bag and clean it out in between each colour. Or do what I did, which was use disposable piping bags (that I purchased in bulk for dirt cheap off ebay) and just clean & use the same piping nozzle for each colour.s

I just used a cake board that I already had and stuck some marshmellows around the edge to form cloud. 

I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out, but I was really happy with it. And most importantly Miss 8 loved it! 

Kylie xx

Re-Grouting!

There are so many cheap things that you can do to give your house a little face lift. We moved into our house a year ago, when it was 16 years old and it was definitely showing it's age. The grout in the kitchen and bathrooms are one of these. No matter how clean you keep your grout, after years of wear, it starts to look a little dark & dirty. There are a few ways that you can give your grout a makeover. A lot of people paint it to give it a fresh new look. I decided to go with another way and grout over the top of the existing grout. I had previously grouted some tiles around the fire in our old house and it is super easy. You can either go with the same colour that you have or choose a different colour. I’m not exactly sure what colour the original grout was, but I’m guessing it was possibly white in the kitchen and dark grey in the Ensuite. We decided to go with a light grey.

You can now purchase pre mixed grout in a variety of colours. I bought this bottle at Bunnings for $10.

here is how to use it...First, I would suggest wearing gloves. I didn’t and wore some skin off my fingers...not a nice feeling! Before starting, give the grout a good scrub and sweep/vacuum the area, so that it is as clean as possible. Then squeeze the grout along the already existing grout lines and smooth out with your finger. When the grout is starting to dry, wipe away any excess grout from the tiles. Once it has dried you have a great new clean line.

Here is how it looks on our ensuite floor 

Before

 After

 These are the tiles of our kitchen splashback. I don't have a great before photo, but if you look at the background of the grout bottle photo, you can see a little of how gross it was. 

And this is the after. 

I love how fresh and clean it looks. A big difference for $10!

More Frugal projects coming soon.

Kylie xx