Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Birthday Cake

When I decided to throw a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse-themed birthday party for Mia, I really wanted to figure out a way to make a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse cake. For those of you that don't have a toddler, here's a shot of the club house.

Originally, I was going to try to make the cake in the shape of the clubhouse, so I purchased a dome-shaped soccer ball cake pan (bottom), another, smaller full ball cake pan (head), and some cookie pop pans (for the ears). Then, three days before the party I panicked and decided that more than likely wasn't going to work. Luckily, I found this post on another Mickey Mouse Clubhouse cake in which she made the clubhouse topper from modeling clay. After a quick trip to Michael's and quite a few bags of Crayola Model Magic (super soft, easy to work with, and most importantly, light enough to set on top of a cake!), I was set to spend an entire evening making a model of the clubhouse. Two gin and tonics, and one and a half movies later, I had a model!

This made the cake part much easier - I could just make a sheet cake and set the model on top. Since I had seen these fun rainbow cakes before, I decided that I would give it a try. I purchased 2 white cake mixes, prepared them, and divided the batter into 6 equal portions, which I dyed with food coloring gel (it took quite a bit of gel to get the intense colors!).

I used a jelly roll pan for the cake (in order to fit the model on top), so I wasn't sure how to get the full rainbow effect in such a shallow pan. I started dumping the colors in globs across the pan, and then basically made piles of rainbow stacks in each one.

 I had serious reservations that any of this would actually work, but ta-da!  It did! Here's what the bottom of the cake looked like after I flipped it out of the pan!

For the frosting, I used a recipe from my friend, Sara (1 c. butter, 3 c. powdered sugar, a little whole milk, and then I added vanilla and green gel dye). It was so good!

The final product? Rainbow cake with vanilla buttercream frosting and a fabulous Mickey Mouse Clubhouse to top (Mickey's head is actually Styrofoam balls that I spray painted black and stuck together with toothpicks! I found the Mickey figurines on Amazon and they were the perfect size!).