Minecraft Birthday Cake

This Minecraft cake is for my grandson's 10th birthday. He loves Minecraft so, what better way to celebrate entry into the double digit age than this time-consuming masterpiece.

He was the one who named this blog for me too.

It started life as a vanilla sponge and a chocolate sponge, sandwiched with vanilla buttercream.

I trimmed the sides of the cake to make it perfectly square, I used a piece of thin card for this. I then used the same piece of card, trimming it smaller each time, and cut the cake into squares.

When cut, it well have vanilla and chocolate cubes inside.

Once crumb coated and chilled, I did my best with the buttercream, to get the sharp edges, but I's hopeless with square cakes. (Work in progress below)

Each fondant square was hand cut and fixed onto the white fondant under layer.  I have no idea how many there are, and I don't think I'll be counting them.

The decorations were handcrafted some time back. Click here for details on how to make your own Minecraft sword and for how I made the name and numbers, click here

He was away for his birthday, as it was the bank holiday, this is why it's a little later than expected.

Quantity of fondant needed for your sized cake

I've added a page which shows guidelines on the weight of fondant you need to cover your cake.

Click here for the details

Sonic the Hedgehog - May 2016

I guess if Grandma makes cakes for others, then she'd better make a darned good one for the main man! The Grandson!!!!

This one had to be my best so far. I went with the list of usual suspects for what he was into at the moment. Expecting Iron Man, Spiderman, Star Wars etc, but no! It was to be Sonic the Hedgehog. Oh eck!

Right, I had three weeks notice! Off to eBay to my trusty cake topper professional! Oh boy they did me proud! The topper, stars and boxes were to arrive the day before his birthday, but two days before the party. I had faith, so I ordered!

Now, the outside had to be white to show up the decorations, so I had to have the inside blue!

Food colour pastes it had to be, based on my previous experiences.

The problem was this ... Our margerine and butter here in the UK is more yellow than our US cousins have, what to do? A Facebook friend suggested Trex. 

I'd read positive and negative reviews, but I had to have blue, using UK marge would have turned it green because of the yellow. You can find my recipie for Trex Butterless buttercream here

Because I was using Trex, it couldn't be your standard Victoria sponge mix, so I used a recipie from the Trex website for the sponge, see here .

It was hard to judge how much food colour paste I needed, but I gave it my best shot. I also wanted white butter cream. Same again with the Trex. 

I'd read only bad reviews about butter icing, right down to "Ick, it's called butter cream for a reason"

Ok, it was up to me to try. Trex has no flavour, so I made sure I flavoured the sponge (vanilla) and thought of caramel for the butter cream. You don't need as much flavour so I'd advise to be sparing and taste check the mix as you go. You also need to ensure you use 20% less Trex to icing sugar recipie, I also added a little milk to soften it up.

It worked!

The texture was light, fluffy and perfect.

The flavours were amazing.

My experience of using Trex has been so positive, I'm going to use it again. 

It's not greasy. 

Sure, it's flavourless but add your own! 

It's that simple.

My Grandson was amazed, he'd never seen a blue cake, and he loved it.

To me, that's all that mattered!