Candy Cake

Recently my son had his cub scout Blue and Gold Banquet - part of it was to bring a dessert for a dessert contest.  I wanted something simple and appealing to 8-11 year old boys - enter, the candy cake:

Last year, Trevor helped him made an R2D2 cake - it was pretty cool, but it got cut up before the judging, so it was probably hard to imagine in all its glory:

So this year I wanted something with minimal effort - and remembered a reeses pieces candy cake I featured quite awhile ago from Take-A-Look Tuesday.  So with that in mind I searched "candy cake" on pinterest, showed him the idea, and we were good to go.

Now, if I were making this for taste, I would use this version from Duhlicious because it's a mousse cake and that seems like a good idea to balance all the candy:

But let's face it - 8-11 year old boys aren't really worth the trouble of a homemade mousse - they'll think anything is good.  So we just made a cake from a box mix and called it good.

A candy cake is great for kid helpers because it doesn't really matter if the icing doesn't look pretty - it gets covered by candy:

I sent Trevor to the store to buy Kit Kats - but I wrote Twix on the list - whoops.  So we just spaced them out a little and it worked just fine:

It was a hit!  I'm sure we'll make this again for some other kid-heavy function in the future..."hey mom, take a picture like I'm taking a giant bite" - gotcha: