I don't mean Saga, the prog rock band from Oakville, Ontario (sorry to disappoint!).
I mean The Saga of the Birthday Cake That Wouldn't Be.
As in saga:  "The texts are epic tales in prose ...of heroic deeds of days long gone, "tales of worthy men,". The tales are usually realistic,... They are sometimes romanticised and fantastic, but always dealing with human beings one can understand." (wiki)

So sit back around your monitor and listen to a woeful (but ultimately triumphant) tale of a (worthy) woman alone against 6 towering tiers of cake, a battalion of cake balls and one final two tiered beast with fangs and flags a-waving.

OK. 
I can't keep that up.
But it is saga-ish. Saga-riffic? Sagalicious?
Meh. It's long.
(But bear in mind, if you are sensitive to graphic scenes of baking disasters, stop now, for once you embark there is no turning back...)

So I meant to make a 6 layered rainbow cake, in fact, I coaxed my daughter into a rainbow tiger birthday (I posted yesterday about how this was all supposed to go) so I could make The Cake.
Things started out well enough.
I made the 6 rainbow layers using 8" cake pans and approximately 2 1/4c. of batter for each layer, dyed with Wilton cake dyes (1 tsp.-ish).
Like this:
So far, so good.
Now, I am crafty, but not much of a hand in the kitchen, I'll admit.
I started stacking cool cakes, using a skiff of icing to seal in the crumbs, but the cracks started in the foundation.  The purple layer wasn't centered and the blue layer was considerably smaller.
The green layer was literally cracked and I clearly did a poor job of leveling it off for stacking.
I lost a retaining wall soon after.
But I pressed on!
Yellow.
Orange.
Pink.
Three cans of icing down on this baby so far (perhaps my fatal error?! we may never know...).
And then I placed it in the fridge with the addition of a number of bamboo skewers intended to hold it together.
But I had a bad feeling about this (me too, Shaggy!).
Somewhere in the next two hours, things went horribly, irreversibly wrong.
We'll never know what happened in the fridge, in the dark (assuming the light really does shut off when you close the door!) that day.
But we opened the door to this.... (please take the children from the room!)
Oh the humanity.
I shut the door, horrified.
And then, opened it slowly....
It was worse.
So much worse.
We now had floor cake.
(And a very happy 4 lb. dog intent on eating his weight in cake carnage!)

It was 4:45 on Friday afternoon.
Party scheduled for Saturday at 1 pm.

I was chastened in my attempts to be a hero.
One compatriot said I should have settled for rainbow icing, instead of trying for the whole rainbow.
I had flown too close to the sun on my wings of wax....

Would we eat cake? Would our heroine (that's me) give in to the pressure to buy a cake at the 24 hour grocery store? Stay tuned for the next gripping chapter.
...to be continued....