Construction Site Cake with Diggers and Edible Rocks!

My three-year-old son is very into “diggers” right now, so I knew this cake would be a hit. I found a photo online for inspiration for this cake, and I would happily give credit, but could not find the source.

The cake itself is three layers of a 12-inch round cake – chocolate, of course. Each layer consisted of one box mix – three boxes total for the cake. The frosting is Wilton’s chocolate butter cream recipe, which is much preferable to canned frosting for decorating, in my opinion, and tastes amazing. A cake-baking friend taught me the awesome tip to use a small foam paint roller (from the hardware store) to smooth out butter cream frosting so that it almost looks like fondant. I used a star tip for the border at the base of the cake.

Although a 12-inch cake is rather large for the number of people I needed it to serve, I wanted a large enough space to fit the construction vehicles without it being too crowded (the vehicles were purchased in a set of 5 for a very reasonable price at Target). I frosted nearly the whole cake, leaving the area that would be “excavated.” I then used a fork to tear out that portion of the cake, and used some of the crumbs on top and in the dump truck. I used edible chocolate rocks, which were purchased at a specialty candy store.

The orange traffic cones are the candles for the cake, which I found online on a party supply site. I made Wilton’s marshmallow fondant recipe for the cut-out letters on the cake. I also made some little orange traffic cones out of the fondant, but ended up using them on the party table, rather than on the cake, since I had the cone candles.

Of the cakes I’ve made, this was actually one of the easier ones. I figured if a section got messed up, I could just make it look like part of the construction site!

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