Excavator Birthday Cake

    My kids' birthdays are only one day apart - March 9th and March 10th, so we have a pretty busy couple of days! My son turned 2 (!) and had a construction-themed birthday party. I found directions for a really cute no-bake cake on familyfun.com. It was a little easy and a lot of fun. Here's the link for the instructions online and how I did it:

Family Fun

http://familyfun.go.com/recipes/edible-excavator-cake-688626/

The recipe called for a pound cake but I couldn't find one anywhere so I bought an angel food cake and it worked great! I cut off about a third of it and placed it on top.


Then I covered the whole thing in yellow frosting. I also frosted a Twinkie to be the loader, and half a Twinkie to be the bucket. Check out my previous blog HEREfor my frosting recipe. Here's a link to it:


http://walkinthesunshineblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/lizard-birthday-cake.html

The arms of the loader are two Twix candy bars! Next, I piped on an outline of the loader, some windows and and a driver using melted chocolate. It was a little harder to control than frosting, but it dried really quickly and didn't blend into the yellow. This was all done a day in advance, so my cake spent some time in the fridge and held up great.

The day of the party I added all the candy extras. I used gum drops as lights on top and both the front and back lights. Four mini chocolate donuts made perfect tires... and it was my personal favorite part of the cake to eat! Another Twix bar makes the smoke stack and yellow jelly beans made the spikes on the bucket. The hardest part was working with those darn yellow Twizzlers! I finally just stuck them in place with toothpicks and a lot of frosting!

The final step was to crush some Oreos and spread it around to create dirt, along with some chocolate candy rocks I found at Wal-Mart! This cake was so fun to make and if you leave off the bucket part it is so easy! Even that part wasn't so hard... and definitely worth it for my sweet 2-year old baby boy!