The 5.5 lb. Cavity

That's how much this weighs and that's what you'll get when you eat all of this! Ha!

I saw this over at Coleen's Recipes and immediately knew that I wanted to make it for my brother's 14th birthday. He loved it! I wrapped it in cellophane and tied a curly ribbon around it. The first thing he did when he tore the wrapper off was to take a deep whiff. Oh, the smell of sugar!

I'm a visual person so I searched online to see if I could find step by step instructions on how to make this, but I couldn't find any. I saw a lot of completed "cakes" but no how to directions. So I took pictures along the way to show you how to make it. I hope you will. Any kid, or graduate would love this! It's great for parties because it serves a ton. You can make them as big or as small as you want. Have fun with it and customize it to the recipient with different types of candy.

Before you begin, separate and line up all your candy, facing them in the same direction. This will help you keep inventory of the candy you have left.

1. Get your self a cake board 2 inches larger than your Styrofoam. This one is 10 inches.

2. Get your Styrofoam rounds (mine were 8-inch) and carve out the centers to hold more candy. You don't have to do this. I carved them with a grapefruit knife.

3. Glue them together with hot glue.

4. Glue the Styrofoam to the cake board and wrap in a wide ribbon. If you leave the plastic on the Styrofoam you don't need to wrap them, but since I cut the centers out I needed to. The ribbon is just a barrier between the glue and the foam. You don't want to pull off candy and pull off chunks of foam too.

5. Start gluing candy onto the cake form, making sure all your candy is facing the same direction.

6. Keep gluing the candy all the way around until all the foam is covered up.

7. Stack candy on top and fill the cavity with as much candy as you can. If you place them in the center neatly, you can get more in there.

8. Keep mounding up the candy and gluing as you go, with just a bead of glue. You don't want to melt your candy or the wrappers. Fill in any voids with lollipops. There's no need to glue those in.

Ta da!

Here is a list of what it cost me to make this thing:

• 2-8" Styrofoam- $5.99 each= $11.98
• Ribbon- $1.97
• Airheads- $1.97
• Airhead Lollipops- $1.97
• Starburst- $2.28
• Starburst Tropical- $2.56
• Trident Watermelon Gum- $2.38
• Twix Minis- $1.00
• Tootsie Mix- $4.34
• Hershey's Party Mix- $9.78

Grand Total= $40.23

NOTE: Styrofoam is expensive. I looked at 3 different Wal-Marts and couldn't find anything bigger than 6-inch rounds. They were $2/each, but they were also only 1-inch tall. I would have needed 4 of them and they still weren't the size I wanted. I finally found the right size at Michaels. Styrofoam is expensive. Did I already mention that?

You can save yourself some money but not using chocolate. Chocolate is expensive, just like Styrofoam. And you also don't have to fill the inside of the foam with candy. That will probably cut your budget by 1/3.

I used 80% of the candy I purchased and Mr. H ate the rest. I bought two flavors of Starburst but only used half of each bag. So total, I would say of the amount I spent on this candy cake, $35 of it went into this gift. It was more expensive than I thought it was going to be, but he loved it and that's all that matters.

Happy Birthday Aaron!

I'll post his real birthday cake later in the week!