Tag Archives: smarties


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Number 3 Smarties Cake

Jakob’s 15th(!!!) birthday is coming up in a few weeks, so just as I’ve been doing for Henri, I’m going to countdown Jakob’s past birthday cakes.

Jakob’s first birthday cake was a simple homemade banana cake with an edible printed sheet.

I’ve never owned a food ink printer so I designed the image on my computer then brought it to a local restaurant supply store who offered the edible print service.

(I don’t have an image of the complete cake for some reason).

His second birthday pirate cake and pirate cupcakes were actually the first food tutorials I’ve posted on this blog. Which brings us to his third birthday. He had 2 cakes when he turned three, as he had both family and friends/daycare parties. For his family party I made this easy “number 3-shaped” cake.

All you need to do to create this cake is bake 2 round cakes. Mine were both 8″. One layer each will work, though if you want a higher cake you can tort and fill each cake so you have 2 layers.

Follow the instructions on the downloadable template above to create your shape. First cut and remove the center of each cake, leaving a ring-shape. Cut away a quarter of each ring, and then position the rings as a “3” to make it easier to see where to cut away the remining bit of cake. So that the cakes sit nicely together, remove a slice off the edge of each ring where the two cakes will touch, so the surfaces that touch are flat, not rounded. (Section 3 in the template).

Then all you need to do is ice and decorate your cake! I decided to keep the small inner cake sections and decorate them as well.

To make decorating super quick and easy, I used Smarties to cover each cake. The longest part of this was sorting the candy packages by color! Once I had them in individual bowls, the placement of each was pretty fast.

First I iced the cake (in my case, vanilla icing on a chocolate cake base), then covered it in the Smarties. I chose to place them in a gradient from darkest on the bottom to lightest on top, for an almost “sunrise”-looking effect.

One of the cake centers was iced and given candles for Jakob to blow out. He got to have this one for himself (and no one else got his germs from trying to blow on the candles!).

The other center was iced in a similar fashion to the main cake, using up the remaining Smarties. I believe we’d sent it home to a family member who’d been unable to attend.

Shaped cakes can be tricky but this one is really easy and looks great, and all it takes is 2 round cake layers, some icing and a bulk bag of candy.

It didn’t only look good- the birthday boy found it tasted finger-licking good too!

Jakob’s other birthday cakes


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Candy Cake

If you’re ever in need of a quick and easy cake decorating idea, do what we did for the family cake for Henri’s 9th birthday and cover it in candy! (Technically “chocolates”, though the Smarties count as both).

Bake your cake(s) and prepare them for decorating with your preferred methods (or follow my tutorial).

While the crumb coat is setting up, prepare your chosen candies and chocolates. As Henri’s birthday is in January, I used Smarties, Aeros and KitKats left over from Hallowe’en. Unwrap everything and crush up anything you want to use crushed (like my Aeros). You want everything ready and at hand while the next layer of icing is still wet, so it will stick well.

Add a clean layer of icing to the cake on top of your chilled crumb coat, and then stick your candies into place. Lining the edges in Smarties is fun, easy and colorful. You can sort by colors and place in a pattern (as I did here) or you can use them randomly as with this cake (or this example).

Finally, you can decorate the top. Use KitKat bars to spell out an initial or age and fill in the remaining surface with crushed Aeros. Pat down gently with a clean, dry hand to embed the little chocolate bits into the icing well, so they don’t fall off when you move or transport the cake.

Candy and cake make a great combination and the great taste will belie just how easy this is to put together for any holiday or occasion.

Henri’s other birthday treats