My daughter’s birthday is a week after Halloween. I’ve been decorating her birthday cakes with leftover Halloween candy since she was four. The idea didn’t come from some cute thing I saw on social media; This was purely out of desperation because I’m not good at decorating cakes.
I’m a pretty good cook if I do say so myself, but baking? Too picky for me. All of my cakes had problems – uneven layers, frosting that was too soft, cake crumbs clumping into the frosting. I tried, practiced, made tons of cakes, tried to improve, but I just couldn’t master the art of cake decorating. This is even more frustrating because I love the taste of homemade cakes and refuse to buy store bought cakes.
Until I came up with the idea of using Halloween candy.
On the afternoon of her fourth birthday, I needed to make the cake and decorations for her birthday party in less than an hour. It was vanilla cake with bubblegum pink frosting that looked sad and plain. It was uneven, I didn’t have enough frosting to cover it, and I ran out of ingredients to make more.
On the counter next to me sat a bucket of leftover Halloween candy and a bag of penny candies from her birthday. Candies and cakes, maybe? I started adding gummy worms, swirling them around the cake, Skittles, Smarties, and other penny candies and the cake started to stick together. The colors are whimsical and make it look like an abstract painting. It’s a little weird, a little kitsch. I give myself a pat on the back because I found a clever, low-waste, yet fun solution. I’m not sure I want to eat it, but how bad can it be?
When I took out the cake, the kids’ faces lit up. The parents in attendance looked at me as if to say, “Really, some more candy?” But naysayers be damned, because once we cut to that fool, we all realized that candy and cake are the perfect combination. Sure, it’s sweet, but the chewiness of the fudge adds to the cake’s fluffy texture. You haven’t truly lived until you taste a Swedish fish swimming in birthday cake frosting.
In the years since, we started making sheet cakes and I let both kids decorate the cakes themselves using leftover Halloween candy.
By the way, the cake is my second tip for making the whole birthday cake thing a lot easier. I use these Nordic Ware Half Sheets. For someone who doesn’t bake often, trying to bake two perfectly level round cakes can be difficult. Yes, I’ve seen tricks for flossing and even making cake layers, but this trick has never worked for me. Half-sheet trays are foolproof, making each slice less cake. Let’s be honest: I’m not a cake fan by any means, and the giant two-tier cake was just too much cake and frosting. I love the single layer square with a cup of coffee. The portions of both are just right. For my own birthday in December, I love making Gramercy Tavern gingerbread cake in a pan (also foolproof) and dusted with powdered sugar.
Kids love adding rows of Skittles around the edges and designing with Kit Kat sticks and various other candy pieces. It was total chaos, but it’s a tradition we look forward to every year now. I’ve noticed over time that we prefer birthday cakes that have more sugar than chocolate. The sweetness of the cake really goes well with the nerdiness and the tartness of the sweet pie. I’ve noticed that my kids prefer gummies to chocolate for the rest of the year, a theme that seems very consistent with Gen Z.
I never thought her birthday cake was a Halloween wreck. Neither did she. This year, on my daughter’s 12th birthday, I asked her if she was ready to give up the candy and cake tradition, and her answer was “no.” “I don’t really like cake, but I like candy.” Well, that’s it.
Katie Elliott is the personal stories editor for Scary Mom. She enjoys cooking, gardening, and chatting with people about everything from how much you love your kids to how much your kids annoy you. She is a mother of two and lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
