Monday, August 10, 2009

Dump Truck Cake

My SUPER-cute nephew just had his first birthday, and they had his party while we were there in Colorado! Erik's sister asked if I could do a cake, which I gladly agreed to.

The theme was centered around this cute dump truck that was a baby shower gift and became a focal piece for pictures during his first year. Click here to see a fun picture.

I baked a chocolate cake (always best for those oh-so-messy-face photos) in two mini loaf pans. The extra batter went into a regular loaf pan - couldn't stand to waste perfectly good cake batter! I carved the shape I wanted, stacked it on top of 1/2 of the other small cake, and then cut graham crackers to form the sides. As you can see, one of the graham crackers broke in two mid-cut, but a little buttercream worked wonders to glue everything together!
That picture makes it look kind of like it's sitting on a reflective surface, but it's actually two little cakes stacked on top of each other.

Here are the leftover scraps. Don't remember if they got eaten or not...

On to the icing. I panicked when I realized that I hadn't bought Oreo cookies to use for the wheels (and in typical Camille-fashion, I was putting this cake together at midnight...no stores open) but I improvised by cutting out circles from the cake scraps.

Like this.

I added the blue frosting on top...


...and black frosting on the bottom. TA DA!

For the large cake, I asked them to order a plain frosted one from Costco and I just piped on the truck design.

That little truck didn't stand a chance.

He needed a little coaching, since he hadn't ever tasted black frosting before (or any frosting, for that matter).

But it didn't take long for him to figure it out!

The happy family.


Wanna try some?

A much-enjoyed cake equals...

...a happy birthday boy!


5 comments:

Diane said...

Camille,

The cake(s) came out so cute! Good things happen at midnight. The creative adrenaline flows or something. As always, I love your step-by-step storytelling with the precious pictures.

tlc said...

SOO CUTE! Of course you were doing it at midnight! That's the way things are done! ;-)

Unknown said...

Wow...did I look like I had that much fun when I ate the cake you made for my birthday? If not, I still thought it was awesome!

hugs...

Unknown said...

My favorite is his whole face covered with icing and his mouth wide open with the fork :)

Debbie said...

Wow Camille! That's a great cake!