Periodic Table of Cake- Jenna

My friend, a Chemistry grad, had a birthday, thus there was a very big need for a Periodic table cake!   I googled pictures of cakes for a while, which is always a good start when brainstorming ideas for cakes, and couldn't figure out what I wanted to do.  I decided upon using Starbursts to create all the elements.  You want to make a 13X9 inch cake (or bigger; I will explain later) in any flavor of choice.  Let completely cool, then, and this is important, level off the top, otherwise your periodic table will not lay right (it'll bulge in the middle).  Then you can ice it with any icing you wish as well; I would do a white or chocolate; not a colored icing because the starbursts add a lot of color by themselves. 

The difficult part is next- unwrapping 102 Starbursts!  I bought 2 bags of the same type of Starbursts, so you will have some extras, but one bag is not enough.  This is the breakdown I used for my cake: 13 Pink, 40 Yellow, 37 Orange, and 28 Red- but this all depends on the distrubution of colors in the bags of Starbursts, so make sure and count

them before deciding on which color to use for each section.  I bought

Wilton black decorating icing, which is wonderful because black is a

difficult color to dye icing and you can put a tip directly onto the top. 

After you have written on all of the Starbursts, which doesn't take as long as you would think, then you just have to put them on top of the cake.  Back to the issue of pan size, if you can snag a bigger pan, do it!  There are 17 rows of elements on the periodic table, and obviously, only 13 inches of the pan.  So, I had to cut a loooooot of the Starbursts so that they all fit.  If you can save yourself this trouble, it will be worth it!  It all comes together pretty quickly, and then you have the nerdiest cake imaginable!  It's pretty easy, and a real crowd pleaser.  :)