Happy Sunday! For the past week or so we have been talking about Valentine's Day crafts and treats to make over at our Facebook Page so, on this week off for me, I decided to show you a super easy cake for you to make for your family! 

This was one of those situations where I experimented for you so you won't make the same mistakes that I did. I made a strawberry cake with lemoncurd buttercream frosting. Now that alone is like a Pink Lemonade. Unfortunately when you added the chocolate M&M's to the mix it wasn't quite as good. After all, a Chocolate Pink Lemonade doesn't sound good. It wasn't awful tho' and once we  learned to just pick off the M&M's and eat them first and then eat the frosting with the cake it was very good! If I were to remake this cake I would pick a plain vanilla frosting instead of the lemon to get a chocolate covered strawberry taste instead! After all, it doesn't matter how pretty your cake is if it doesn't taste as good inside as it looks outside!

Because of the chocolate candy on the outside I did not fill this 6 inch cake. You want to balance out the sweetness or you end up with a toothache type of over sweet. I then covered it in the slightly soft lemoncurd buttercream. This was the second lesson I learned. The soft icing, while being good enough to eat by the spoonful, isn't really stiff enough to hold up the heavy candy so they slid just a little bit in the frosting. Either adding more powdered sugar to firm up the frosting or using a different recipe for the frosting would work.

The rest of this process was, well, a piece of cake. I separated the candy colors and started out making the heart shape on top. Then I circled the top with another color and filled in the open space with another color. For whatever reason I ended up with a lot less white in the candy bag than the other colors so I decided to alternate the upper and lower bands with the white and dark pink. Then it was just two more bands of the light pink and the red and I was done. It really was a quick and easy process.

Now you could absolutely cover the cake with the candy in a much tighter pattern so that you could barely see the icing underneath but that does make the cake harder to cut. I wanted a simple pattern for all of you to copy that is quick to put together, doesn't cost a lot of money to make (the cost of the candy adds up quickly!) and is easy to serve in pretty slices. 

If you end up making a version of this (or maybe cupcakes on this theme) please do send me an email with your photo so I can see it too? I love to see what you guys come up with!

Next week begins my work on my demo cakes for a Bridal Faire this upcoming year. I always take 2 weeks off to play and then use the last two weeks in January to work on these new designs. Can't wait to show you the first one next Sunday!

Cat