Coolest Treasure Chest Cake

My husband wanted to have a treasure chest cake so I looked around and found lots of ideas on this site! Thanks so much for being here, so I thought I would share how ours turned out. I notice that a lot of your cakes were small, made out of loaf pans and I needed a bigger cake so I used a regular 9 x 11 cake pan and 2 boxes of cake mix.

I made the mix to directions (we used strawberry cake). I also added a strawberry creme pudding mix to make the cake moister. I poured more than half of the prepared batter into one pan and the rest in a second pan to make a thicker cake and a thinner one. Cooked per directions.

I used pull ‘n peel Twisters, Reese Pieces, Hershey Gold nuggets and some candy necklaces (well truth be told they were Hanna Montana Halloween candy bracelets but nobody seemed to notice, and finally some Nilla Wafers for the “sand” effect.

For the frosting I used two Big cans of chocolate and a little bit of a can of white dyed yellow. I froze the cakes so they were easier to work with.

I covered a cookie sheet with tin foil and put the thicker of the two cakes on it and frosted it with the chocolate frosting. Then I opened up two of the Hershey Gold nuggets and set them about an inch back from the front edge on the front two corners to hold the top layer up a little. I laid down some nuggets and candy bracelets and yellow Reese Pieces.

Then I laid the thinner of the two cakes on top making sure it stayed propped up on the candy.

I frosted it with the chocolate, being careful not to get too much on the candy.

I unpeeled the pull and peel Twisters and made accents followed by the yellow Reese Pieces for the bolt heads. I used a toothpick to poke holes in the side of the cake and fed a Twister in there to create a handle on each side. I crushed up the Nilla Wafers and laid it around the cake.

Finally I mixed up some yellow die with the vanilla frosting and piped Happy Birthday Bill.

It was a lot of fun to do. My kids actually got to help through the process and they loved that!