Adventures in Birthday Cake

I had a birthday. Since I have too many favorite cakes - and the advent of my birthday occurred while staying with my parents and having a great cake-baker (my mom) directing the experiment, we decided to make a layer cake combining three of my favorites. Luckily, they all had similar ingredients and were perfectly tied together by the cream cheese frosting. The high fruit content led my mother to name it, brilliantly, the "Carmen Miranda Cake." It's also a great source of fiber! When it came time to set the dome over the cake on its platter, we discovered the cake was too tall and had to improvise like MacGyver...duct tape and boxes of Jell-O kept the dome from marring the frosting top.