A Five Layer Birthday Cake

This summer Charlotte turned 21! In our home, the tradition is the birthday girl/boy has the privilege of requesting their favourite meal and dessert. Charlotte is the one in our family with the high taste buds and eclectic food loves. When her five year old birthday rolled around, she requested smoked oysters. Haha isn't that what every five year old wants?
Our mama managed to convince her to have pizza or hot dogs, something more "kid friendly" for her friends, and then of course smoked oysters just for her, later on in the day.

As we've gotten older, this birthday tradition still holds, but instead of it just being our mama or dad make all the food, we do too. This year all of us waited to see what birthday girl Charlotte dreamed of for dinner & dessert. Her heart was set on on a five layer cake, and not just any five layer cake, one that was chocolate, vanilla, with frosting, jam, cookies and oh of course iced in some sort of 'ombre' fashion.

Do you know how much a cake like this costs? We googled it and a five layer custom cake birthday cake, can be anywhere between $60-$100! While it did require a bit of fussy work, our cake probably came in close to $30 in ingredient cost.

Leah and John baked the following two different kinds of cakes in 8 inch round cake pans..

Three layers of our favourite chocolate cake which you can find the recipe here

and

Two layers of our very delicious vanilla cake which you can find the recipe here
( just omit the funfetti)

The cake was iced with white icing which you can find here (just omit nutmeg)
and chocolate icing, which is the same recipe but with 1/2 cup of cocoa or more if desired.

and together with our Mama they assembled the following layers:

First: chocolate cake, iced with white icing and crumbled cookies, we love these ones
Second: white cake, layered with strawberry jam and then white icing
Third: chocolate cake iced with white icing and crumbled cookies
Fourth: white cake, layered with blueberry jam and then white icing
Fifth: chocolate cake topped with icing, cookies and fresh raspberries

After the cake was put together, the entire tower of goodness was iced with white icing, mixed in with chocolate to give it that ombre looked. We crumbled the rest of the cookies on top and voila!
A Five Layer Cake, entirely dairy and wheat free!

What about you? Any birthday traditions? Share with us!