The Bucket Cake

I finally made the bucket cake.  I had seen this cake numerous times in different posts and on blogs and it looked awesome.  And easy.  So I thought I'd give it a try for a party some friends were having.  It was an end of summer/birthday, basically, the perfect excuse for a cake that looks for a bucket filled with M&Ms.

So I made it and it turned out alright, but in all honesty, it was kind of a pain in the butt.  It was a pain to put together and an even bigger pain to cut.  Nobody on the blog posts I had read mentioned that it is almost impossible to cut through M&Ms that had been glued into place with icing and then put in a refrigerator for two days.  Although it looked great in the end, and numerous people actually attempted to put their hands in it to reach for candy, I am not sure I would do it again for the pure pain-in-the-butt factor...

I will openly admit that I made these cakes from a mix.  Duncan Hines and I have had some nice times together, and I didn't see any reason to break that up now.  

I also made two cakes with the full intention of taking them to two different parties.  I didn't make it to one party and that cake is now in my freezer where it will probably remain for the next six months when I remember it's in there and throw it away.

I did make the frosting from scratch (regular decorator's buttercream - powdered sugar, butter, vanilla...), but obviously bought the candy. 

Here it is in all it's glory,  I think it looked better in person.  I found the best way to do it was actually to ice the top and shove the M&Ms in first.  I started by dumping a bunch on an pressing them in and the used more to fill in the white spots.  It might have worked better if I had started with colored icing, maybe brown.  Then, breaking the Kit-Kat bars into twos, I spread frosting on the bottom and pressed it to the side of the cake.  This also worked better than putting the frosting on the cake and pushing the Kit-Kats on.  The frosting dried to fast.  

Although I'm not typically a fan, I might even say canned frosting would work well for this.  It would have been slimier than what I made and might have held everything in place better.  Maybe the chocolate fudge in a can...

Regardless of my personal issues with the cake, it looked fun and tasted sugary-delicious and people enjoyed it in a "diabetic-coma-inducing" kind of way.