It’s time to prep your 12lbs of Ultimate Vanilla Cake! Divide your batter into 4 equal parts (3lbs of batter each) then dye each quarter of batter a fun carnival colour – one pink, one blue, one red and one yellow. Once your batter is coloured to your liking, pour each bowl of batter into its own 8” round cake pan, lined with parchment paper, and bake all four at 350 degrees fahrenheit for 1 hour and 40 minutes.

Once your cakes are out of the oven and have cooled down, level your cakes using a serrated knife and ruler then remove the caramelization from the bottoms. Using a 7”0 pan as your guide and a small serrated knife, remove the caramelization on the sides as well to reveal the fun carnival colours.

TIP: It’s easier to level cakes when they are cooler so let them chill in the fridge for a bit before you begin to level them!

Cut each cake into 3 layers creating a total of 12 layers that are ½” thick.

Using a 2½” circle cutter, cut a circle out of the centre of 8 of the layers leaving one layer of each colour without a chamber.

Use Sir Squeeze-A-Lot to soak all of your cake layers with simple syrup, then allow a few minutes for the cake to absorb it.

Beginning with a full layer of red then a full layer of blue, start filling and stacking your cake with Italian meringue buttercream. Above the two full layers, stack the 8 secret chamber layers following and repeating the red, blue, pink, and yellow pattern. To avoid getting any buttercream on the inside of the secret chamber, lay the circle cutter again in the centre of the first blue layer and ice around it then continue with the secret chamber layers. Make sure to clean off the edges of the cake when icing it.

Fill the secret chamber with the colourful sixlets until you reach the top. Once the chamber is full, top the cake off with the final two full layers of pink and yellow.

Crumb coat your cake with Italian Meringue Buttercream and chilli for 20 minutes, or until firm 

Remove your cake from the fridge and apply another layer of buttercream, smoothing all sides with a bench scraper. Let the cake chill in the fridge again until firm.

Move the cake to a cake stand then grab a fabric measuring tape to equally mark the cake – each of my marks were 1½” apart. At each mark, add a piece of licorice making sure to cut it to the height of the cake.

To make the popcorn container, grease the outside of a plastic cup then roll out some white gumpaste and wrap it around the cup. The gumpaste needs to dry so make sure you make this in advance.

To create the merry-go-round, add candy sticks between each piece of licorice alternating the positions starting from the top edge to the bottom edge to achieve the look. At the top of each piece of licorice, add gumballs in rainbow sequence.

Place the popcorn container at the top of the cake in the centre and fill it up with popcorn. There is no such thing as too much popcorn so let some spill out and place more around the outside of the container.

Add balloon lollipops around the cake by inserting the plastic dowels into the cake and then inserting the lollipop sticks into the dowels to support the weight. Around the bottom of the cake, add some chopped up rock candy. Lastly, add cotton candy poofs to the top of the candy sticks that were aligned with the bottom edge. This is a super fun cake so add as much candy as you’d like and wherever you’d like. The more candy the merrier!