Construction Birthday Cake

When my now middle child turned 2 (youngest at the time), I kind of had a melt down. I was in complete denial that my baby was growing up. And it made sense to me why mothers like to baby their youngest for so long.

But, this time around, I’m doing a lot better! I was actually really excited to make a cake, and help him celebrate. We’ve even been practicing how to say ‘two!’ and hold up 2 fingers.

I debated for a long time what kind of cake to make. He is all about any kind of big vehicles. Construction, garbage, emergency, big pickups, etc. My sister-in-law helped me look online to find some inspiration. We found this, and I was totally inspired.

Construction Cake 2 layer 8” cake

With a serrated knife, I cut out a part of the cake, flipped it over on top, so it looked like the excavator was digging a hole. Then I frosted the whole cake. I put crushed up Oreos in the hole and on top of the mound. I also added some of these rocks. The cones and orange circles are made out of fondant. I used cookie cutters for the squares of the cones, and also the circles. The tops of the cones I hand shaped.

Frosting: I made a triple recipe of my favorite buttercream, and added chocolate!

3 sticks (1 1/2 C) butter softened

4 1/2 cups powdered sugar

2 tsp vanilla

12 oz chocolate

• Chop your chocolate (unless you’re using chocolate chips) and melt in a double boiler. Set aside to cool.

• Cream butter, and add powdered sugar 3/4 C at a time, mixing to combine before adding more, scraping sides as needed.

• Mix in vanilla, and cooled chocolate.

As much as I loved the outside of this cake, I think the inside was my favorite:

so, isn’t that cool??? I can’t lie, it turned out even better than what I was hoping. It was totally an experiment. I got my inspiration from this tutorial, but made my cuts slanted, so it would look like construction tape. Making it 2 layered made it even better, and it was the perfect touch to this construction cake!!

**I made a picture tutorial on the slanted stripes if you want more details!**

I made 2 cakes: one chocolate and one vanilla. The vanilla I dyed yellow with gel coloring, and the chocolate, I used black cocoa! It makes the cake totally black. It also smells like Oreos. But, if you can’t or don’t want to get black cocoa, just use the recipe with normal cocoa, and use black gel coloring.

Also, I made both recipes as is, so I had 4 layers, enough for 2 double layer cakes.  I cut them both, and then picked which ones I thought would look better.  If you don’t want that much cake, either make a half batch of each recipe, or, make the vanilla recipe and dye it 2 different colors.

Chocolate Cake Recipe makes 2 8” layers

found this recipe at Engineer Baker

1 1/3 C flour

1 2/3 C sugar

1/2 C cocoa (see note above for details of cocoa)

1 1/3 tsp baking soda

2/3 tsp salt

2/3 C oil

2/3 C sour cream

1 C water

4 tsp vinegar

2 eggs

1/2 tsp vanilla

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and prepare your pans with spray and wax paper.
• Sift together the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt.  Whisk to combine.
• Add the oil and sour cream – this will be thick!
• Gradually beat in the water. 
• Add vinegar and vanilla and blend.
• Whisk in the eggs and beat until will blended, scraping sides of bowl as needed.
• Divide evenly into 2 prepared pans, and bake 25-30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
• Let sit for 10 minutes, then invert onto wire rack, remove wax paper, and invert again onto a wire rack to let cool completely. 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my sweet little guy!