Easter Monstrosity

I'm not gonna lie.  This cake was a gigantic pain in my butt.  I went a little crazy with my idea of a cute cake for Easter.  I have always wanted to make one of those cakes with different colored layers, but I didn't really know how: hence the pain.

I used two cake mixes, cuz I wanted three layers.  I wanted to make my favorite cake recipe, Lemon Cream, which adds cream cheese and sour cream to a lemon cake mix.  Since I didn't want the yellow cake to mess with the other colors, I used a white cake mix and put lemon extract in it.  At least that part worked!  I mixed it all together so I had to guess how much to remove to die each layer different colors.  I did not guess well.  The last layer was the pink one, and I ended up using mostly the whole batch of mix for three layers instead of four.  Then the layers didn't match the peeps (I also had to go to two different stores three times to get the right combo of peeps colors) I should have gotten the neon die.  Oh well.  Plus I only had two cake pans so I had to wait for the first layer to cool, then wash the pan and bake the third layer.  Every layer ended up a different size.  What I learned from this is that I should have used just one cake mix and divided it into three smaller layers instead.  Duh.

Then I made home made cream cheese frosting.  It was really good, but it was hard to work with, it kept sliding down the cake, so I had to put it in the fridge between decorating stages.  Yes, there were stages.

I died the coconut myself, which was a lot easier than I thought, but still a pain.

Here is Erin testing a peep for me, the yellow ones did not make the final cut.  She liked them, though.

Then I had to frost each peep to glue it on, cuz I did the peeps the next day and the frosting wasn't really wet anymore.  My three color pattern did not quite work on the bunnies, there was a place where it went blue purple blue instead of blue purple pink.  It bugged me, but probably no one else noticed. This cake is HUGE.

So here is the final product: Lemon Cream Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting and Coconut Garnish with Three Colored Layers.  OMG.  I think I'm crazy.  Another reason for the title of this blog.