Construction Cake

Click here for details of my son's construction themed birthday party.

• I am messy, so I always use parchment or waxed paper under my cakes while I decorate.

• I used two boxes of devil's food cake mix, baked as directed in two 9x13 rectangle pans.

• I used toothpicks to mark a road. I then frosted the entire cake with cream cheese icing that I tinted with an absurd amount of green food coloring. This is as close to grass green that I could manage. I have since learned that gel food dyes work better and you use less, but I haven't tried that yet.

• It took a little less than two tubs of frosting and I really loaded up the top so I could 'pull it' to look more like grass. The sides don't have to be thick or pretty because you can cover them later. I know you can use tips and bags to get a grassy look, but I don't have the patience for that. I have no idea where I learned this trick but I just stuck a clean butter knife flat on the frosting & pulled straight up all over to get the look I wanted. See the picture? I know it looks like waves of green water but in the big picture, it served its purpose for a three year old.

• Then fill the roadway with graham cracker crumbs (I only used 2 whole crackers, crushed in a baggie).

 
Now for the details:

• Chocolate sugar wafers stuck onto the sides....please learn from my very lucky mistake: They go soft and kinda chewy overnight AND they fall apart waiting for the party, so if you want them to stay nice and perfect, wait until the last minute to use them on the cake itself. I personally love how they were falling all over the place and it looked like it was done on purpose.
• I ran out of wafers near the back corner so I just used popsicle sticks to look like a wooden fence. I would have liked for them to be the wide ones, but I used what I had on hand.
• The little guy standing near the candles is one of the toy drivers from another construction truck among our playroom fleet.
• The rocks are actually completely edible chocolate rocks that Santa found at TJMaxx while looking for stocking stuffers. I somehow managed to convince my child to let me save most of them for his construction party and hid them away until the day of the party.
• Lastly, after the cake was set up at the party, I stuck his excavator/digger at the end of the road and crumbled the cake a bit to make it look like it was under construction.

Pretty cool, huh? Candy coated chocolate 'rocks'