Planet Cake

This out-of-this-world birthday cake was created for a space-crazy three year old boy. He was very pleasantly surprised when a pile of gummy worms and Oreo crumbles spilled from the center.

Creating this cake is easy once you know how. Here's how we did it.

1. Make two cakes in round bowls. For our cake, we used one large round metal bowl for each piece. However, it took two cake mixes for each half (for a total of four cake mixes). We used two white and two chocolate. We had to bake our cakes at 250 for two hours and 350 for one half hour to finish them. Be sure to grease the bowl liberally. 
2. Remove the cakes. Flatten the flat side.
3. Cut a hole in the center of each cake, if you want to fill it. We filled ours with gummy worms and Oreo cookie crumbles. Angle a knife toward the center of the cake and cut in a circle to form a hole. Fill it until the filling is level with the surrounding cake.

4. Frost the flat surface of the cake (and filling). Stack the cakes flat-side together, using this frosting layer as glue.
5. Frost the entire outside of the cake. We used green-tinted buttercream frosting.
6. Create the rings by sliding colored Twizzler licorice onto skewers. Insert the skewers at regular intervals around the cake. Connect pipe cleaners into a long rope and weave them between the skewers to finish the rings.