My son announced that he would like “a digger cake” about 2 days before his birthday, and after much panic, frantic trawling of the internet and taking inspiration from the cakes on this site, I came up with this Construction Digger Cake. I had to use a small Lego ‘Scoop’ from Bob the Builder as a model while I put it together otherwise there’s no way it would have ended up resembling a digger!
The body of the digger is made from Madeira cake – I had a complete disaster with the ones I made and ended up having to rush out and buy 2 rectangular slabs of it from the supermarket. I cut one in half to make the cab, and glued them together with apricot jam. I coated the entire thing in apricot jam and then covered them with ready-coloured yellow sugarpaste.
The wheels are made from doughnuts (large wheels) and Jaffa Cakes (small ones). I was going to use Wagon Wheel biscuits for the large wheels and Oreos for the small ones but they just weren’t big enough. They’re held on with bits of Mikado chocolate covered biscuit sticks (I think they’re also called Pocky).
The front and back scoops are bought apricot Swiss roll covered in the sugarpaste (glue it on with jam again). I cut it into 2 parts – the larger part made the big scoop at the front and the smaller part is the back scoop. I rested these up against the body of the digger and propped the front one up with Cadbury’s chocolate fingers to get the right angle. The arms of the scoops are made from more chocolate fingers. To hold the front ones in place on the digger, I used Mikado sticks as ‘nails’ – just snapped off required lengths, then pushed them in where I needed the arms to be supported. The back arm is pushed into a small cube of sugarpaste at the bottom, and a larger bit at the top squashed onto both chocolate fingers.
I removed the centre of the front Swiss roll (not too much as it collapses otherwise!) then covered both scoops in Betty Crocker Chocolate Fudge Frosting to look like mud and stuck Smarties in it, plus scattered a few more round the cake. The windows are white sugarpaste, edged with some more yellow to hide the joins. The light on top and the headlights and rear lights are Midget Gem sweets.
The mound of mud at the front is another bit of Swiss roll (realized I didn’t have anywhere to stick a candle at the last minute).
If I ever had to do it again (please no!) I would probably use Nutella chocolate spread instead of the frosting – I didn’t realize it was almost completely hydrogenated fat.
In process of making digger cake how much sugar paste did you use please
Thank you. You are a life saver. xxx
I will definitely be trying this one for my grandson’s 2nd birthday. Inspirational. Well done!
I think I got 2 blocks, about 500g in total. The largest area to cover was the cab/body section.