3rd Birthday Cake Fiasco

When I joined Pinterest, this 3rd birthday cake from Enchanted Mommy is the very first thing that I pinned.  I have been looking forward to making it for Leah’s 3rd birthday for months!

But things didn’t exactly go according to plan.  It is so frustrating when you want to try something that works so well for other people, but fails miserably when you try it yourself!  It’s such a terrible feeling!

But, it was Leah’s birthday, she needed a cake, and it wasn’t completely ruined, it just didn’t turn out how I had planned (and hoped and dreamed it would).  *sigh* Here is what Plan B ended up looking like:

Here’s how it all went down… I made two bundt cakes with my mother in law’s homemade chocolate cake from scratch recipe, no problem:

I picked up everything I needed for the cake, tons of M&M’s, and even a cake tray to put the cake on:

I cut out the pieces of the cake and shaped them into the shape of the number 3:

And then I iced it with the homemade icing that I normally use on our chocolate cakes:

So far so good, right?  So I started putting on the M&M’s:

Except after a few rows, this started happening (sorry for the blurry photo, but you get the idea):

The homemade icing was too wet, and the M&M’s on the sides were falling off!!!!

I almost cried when I had to pick them all off!  It’s making me a little sad again just looking at this photo.  *hanging my head in shame*

So a note to anyone else wanting to try this, DO NOT use homemade icing that doesn’t harden.  Just play it safe and go with a regular store bought tub of icing!

I scraped off the coloured icing, and covered the bare spots with some leftover icing (luckily I made tons of icing) and I had to come up with a Plan B.  I considered sprinkles, but they probably would have caused a similar problem.  So I found some coconut in my pantry, and toasted it under the broiler:

Which was actually really delicious!  Probably way more delicious than a cake covered with M&M’s!  And it was still in the shape of the number 3.  But it was sadly not nearly as beautiful as the cake that I wanted to make:

So a sad and disappointing lesson learned: M&M’s do not stick to my homemade icing.  It was a delicious cake though.  And it’s not that bad, is it?  Luckily Kate’s 3rd birthday is just a little over 2 years away.  So I’ll get a second chance.  🙂

[Edit: I couldn’t wait two years for Kate’s third birthday, so here the link to her first birthday cake… this one worked out much better!]

Source : onelittleproject.com
Read more...