Candyland Cake

If you've never heard of Karneval, it's a festival celebrated in many countries, including Germany, where everyone dresses up in funny costumes and attends a huge parade with loud, festive music where the people in the parade throw candy at the crowd. Every year we get a lot of candy and this year was no exception. I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to make a Candyland cake. We've been talking about it for ages, so the time was ripe.

First off, legal blah blah: This post was neither sponsored nor affiliated with Hasbro. Design used with permission.

I started out by baking one recipe of my vanilla cake which I turned into funfetti cake and baked in a ten inch square cake pan. Then I layered it into two layers, which I then laid on a baking sheet next to each other. I even trimmed off a strip of cake from both of them so they would fit flush against each other. Then I frosted the cake with vanilla American buttercream. I couldn't chill it because the cake was too large to fit in the fridge, but since it wasn't stacked, it wasn't as important.

 I got out a rainbow of fondant and noticed that I didn't have any yellow or blue, so I colored it with food coloring.

 My daughters helped me make the cake. My five-year-old, in particular, helped with every stage.

 We rolled out every color of fondant and cut out a whole bunch of little squares with a little square cutter that I have.

 Then we laid them onto the cake in rainbow order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink. Repeat as necessary. We snaked them around the cake as if it were a real game board. You can absolutely use candy, such as Starburst or something similar, to create the game squares, but we only had maybe five or six little square candies among all of our stash of candy from Karneval, so I chose to make them out of fondant instead.

 Now, Candyland traditionally has a lot of candy canes decorating it. Candy canes are next to impossible to find in Germany, but we did have a lovely alternative: marshmallows. Several pink and white striped marshmallows were among the candy we had from Karneval, so I used them to surround the cake and create a border.

 When I ran out of long ones, I used the small ones to fill in the gaps.

I let my kids help me decide where to place all the locations from Candyland. I looked at several examples of the real board and discovered that the game Candyland has changed a great deal over time. Locations have moved around, disappeared, new ones have appeared. There are many different versions of this game board, so there was no wrong placement of anything on the cake. My oldest wanted chocolate, so she chose to start out the game with the chocolate swamp. We made it out of several different bars of chocolate of various kinds. Some were cut in half and others were left whole.

 We couldn't make gumdrop mountain, because gumdrops are few and far between in Germany. So, we made gummy bear mountain instead. We used all sorts of different gummy bears of all colors and flavors.

 We did not forget licorice lagoon, but we only had one single licorice candy among our Karneval stash. We cut it into pieces to create licorice lagoon.

 Next to licorice lagoon, we find snowflake lake made with white peppermint candies.

 Of course, we couldn't make Candyland without lollipop woods. I cut down the sticks just because the cake isn't very thick, so if I hadn't, they would fall over and tear at the cake.

 But seriously, there's a lot of opening packages involved.

 I also made peanut acres out of Erdnuss Flips, which is a kind of peanut-shaped and peanut flavored chips. Finally, candy castle is made with pink marshmallows and round candies.

 Thank you, Sabrina, for the help.

   But seriously, how amazingly adorable is that?

 I'm seriously ready to bust out the game pieces and play.

 The chocolate swamp is just begging to get eaten.

 Gummy bear mountain was a bit big, but that's Germany for you.

 Lollipop woods is a place I wouldn't mind getting lost in.

 Candy castle is a stack of fluff I would love to jump into.

 Snowflake lake is an oasis of white in the middle of the color.

 Licorice lagoon can't be skipped, of course.

 Peanut acres looks so fun and was my youngest daughter's favorite.

 With this much color and candy, literally no child can resist.

    Now, let's go through the board as if it were life sized... welcome to the chocolate swamp.

 Come visit us in licorice lagoon.

 Skate around snowflake lake.

 Celebrate your triumph at candy castle.

 Get lost in lollipop woods.

 Bounce along gummy bear mountain.

 My kids could hardly wait to dive in.

 

 And don't forget the party inside as well.

To watch us make the whole thing on our YouTube channel, click here: https://youtu.be/DWFxxpgAz4I
Um zuzuschauen, wie wir die ganze Torte auf unserem YouTube Kanal machen, hier klicken: https://youtu.be/4OMV9b8y_Sw