Select your cake pans

You will need at least four, maybe five cake pans. I used a 9 in., 8 in., and two smaller baking dishes. However, the size of your cake will vary depending on how many people you need to serve, or what cake pans you actually have! You can stack your pans upside down to get an idea of the shape.

Alternatively, you could use the same size pans and layer them, then carve out the shape. That’s a lot of wasted cake batter though.

Carve out the shape

For tips on cake baking you can visit my Preparing to Decorate Your Cake series. Otherwise, I’ll assume you know enough to get on with the decorating! I would like to stress that leveling your layers is important. Also, I carved the shape after I had placed my cake on the cakeboard (a strong plastic serving plate covered with aluminum foil and turned upside down).

Have a picture of a Hershey Kiss or a real on on hand to use as a guide for carving. Make sure you have a long, sharp, serrated knife and start off slowly cutting just a little at a time. Remember you can always slice more off, but it’s hard to put it back on.

Ice it!

As you can see, it starts out looking pretty sloppy. The great thing about a giant Hershey Kiss though, is that it has to be chocolate! Chocolate cake, chocolate icing, so you don’t have to worry so much about a few stray crumbs mixed in with the icing.

Read my tips on icing cakes if you haven’t already. I placed this in the freezer for about an hour before I began icing it because I wanted as smooth a surface as possible.  You will want to be very generous with the amount of icing you use. The very top of the kiss is completely built up with icing.

Finishing touches

What really sells this cake is the “wrapping”. The birthday message was printed out landscape on regular paper and then cut. The wrapper is two sheets of aluminum foil taped together. You could probably use silver foil wrapping paper as well. I crumbled the aluminum foil and then smoothed it out to give it a more authentic look.