Celebrating Three!

My son turned 3 recently, and as soon as I saw this eye-popping cake on Pinterest pinned from Enchanted Mommy's site, I knew it was the perfect one for his birthday celebration!  He fell in love with M&Ms while we were potty-training him this past year (for every successful potty trip, he got 2 M&Ms as reward).  Many thanks to the mommy who originally made this fun and creative cake!

I basically followed the instructions on the site.  They seemed simple enough:  (1) take two bundt cakes, slice and form together to make the number 3, then (2) ice with chocolate frosting, and (3) cover in M&Ms.

I decided to make Martha Stewart's Lemon Ginger Bundt Cake (if you want to keep things really simple, you can purchase two bundt cakes from the bakery or grocery store).  This lemon ginger cake is fabulous!  It has great flavor and texture.  If you're not a fan of ginger, you can leave it out but I love the addition of the flavor (you can find crystallized ginger in the baking section of most grocery stores).

While the two bundt cakes were baking in the oven, I sorted out the M&Ms by color.  This would have been a fun exercise for my boys except I couldn't trust them to leave enough M&Ms for the cake!  I used four 12.6 oz bags of dark chocolate M&Ms to get enough of each color (did you know there are more orange and blue M&Ms than any other color in any given bag?).

When the cake had finished baking and cooled off, it was ready to slice.  Here are the slices I made to form the number 3 (by the way, this would also be a fun 8th birthday cake!).

Once formed, I iced a thin layer of chocolate frosting onto the cake (I used Savory Sweet Life's Dark Chocolate Ganache recipe but canned frosting works perfectly fine!).  The frosting acts as glue for the M&Ms, but beware, too much frosting and your M&Ms will drown in chocolate!

Obviously, the most tedious part was strategically placing each M&M.  It took about an hour to accomplish this.  But the finished product is, oh, so worth it!

This little guy made it worth all the effort.

This cake is perfect for any special 3rd occasion!