Mini Fall Pinwheel Cakes

My mother's 84th birthday gave me a good excuse to try out a fall tea party idea (with the girls' help), that I had been thinking about since first seeing...

...the Duncan Hines "Perfect Size" cake mixes on our store's shelves.  The mixes come with their own disposable baking pan, and enough cake and frosting mix to make a small cake meant to serve 2 to 4 people (perfect tea party size).

We made 4 cakes in all - one vanilla with chocolate frosting, and three lemon.  Before we frosted the cakes though, we added a few drops of red and yellow food coloring to one of the lemon frosting mixes, and a whole lot of red to another, giving us brown, yellow, red (or a reddish pink), and orange frosted cakes.

We sliced each cake into eight small pieces...

...and then removed slices from each cake, piecing them back together on fresh plates, into pinwheel patterns.

We used a butter knife to gently slide the pieces together, before cleaning any stray frosting smears from the plates with a clean, damp rag...

...and we were all ready to celebrate a fall birthday with Grandma.

I was worried that cutting the cakes several hours ahead of serving, would cause them to dry out where the slices weren't pushed completely back together, but the little mixes are quite moist, and our pieced together cakes stayed fresh and nice even into the next day, when we finished off the leftovers.