DIY Construction Birthday Cake

I’m more of a #craftfail mom most of the time but my DIY Construction Birthday Cake left everybody wowed, including Today.com. And best of all, it involved only 3 easy steps.

My 3yo is nuts about everything construction. One of his first frequent words was “digging.” Every single time we’d drive by even the most minimal of construction sites, he’d yell, “Look mommy, DIGGING!!!” in that adorable high-pitched little voice of his. By the time he was 2, he knew the names of more construction vehicles than I did (although that wouldn’t have been hard).

I’ve almost caught up from nightly readings of this pretty amazing construction book his Uncle Michael gave him for his 2nd birthday though. And I do mean nightly. The kid is in love with this book. I can now accurately name at least 3 types of construction equipment before I inevitably get confused and just say something like, “whatever, it pushes dirt around” and am corrected (by a 3yo) that it’s an excavator.

So while he wanted a construction birthday cake, he specifically said he wanted a bulldozer construction cake and that got me thinking about digging – so after searching around the internet a bit, I found this Betty Crocker recipe for a chocolate construction cake.

One small problem: I didn’t want a recipe. I didn’t want to bake anything because while I like to bake, with two small kids, I’m too busy doing ALL THE THINGS. And I didn’t want the decorating to be as complicated as they made it. Because I’m not a great DIYer. I like to do simple things but I don’t usually always pull them off. This time, however, I made the DIY construction birthday cake to end all DIY construction birthday cakes with a few simplified steps. And it was so freaking easy, it’s really no-fail. Here’s how you can do it too.

First things first. Make sure you have a set of these (or some other) small construction toys. Chances are if your little tyke wants a construction cake, you probably already have some mini trucks around. But if not, I recommend this set and a small clear backpack to keep them in (I like to keep it packed all the time so we can just grab it and go to keep him occupied instead of climbing the curtains when we go to restaurants, other peoples’ homes, etc).

Pick up a chocolate cake with chocolate icing (8 inch or 10 inch) from your local grocery store. Mine was $15.00. (Feel free to make your own chocolate cake from a box or from scratch and frost it yourself — if you like to make things hard for yourself. Which I do not.)

Transfer the cake to a large platter so you have room for your entire construction site with all it’s pieces/parts.

Now here’s where you transform it:

1. Take a fork and start scraping out a pit in your cake. Make jagged indents with your fork so it looks like an excavator has dug out the “ground.” Be sure to put the cake and icing you scrape off aside in a separate bowl because you’ll need for the next step.

2. Once you’ve dug out the right amount, mush the icing and cake in the separate bowl up together to make “dirt.” You can use all the icing and cake but it’ll turn out a little more like mud. I recommend tossing about half of the icing in the trash and mixing the rest in with the cake. The consistency should be just about right.

3. Place the bulldozer and the dump truck on the plate near your excavated area and fill them with some of your “dirt.” Place construction workers, barricades, a cement truck or whatever else you have on the top of the cake then add your candles. If your family has a silly sense of humor like ours, drop one of your workers into the pit just to give your guests a laugh. Make a few piles of “dirt” with the remaining cake/icing mix and place it around the plate for added authenticity.

I let my 7yo help me decorate the cake because there was really no way to mess it up and it was a fun thing for us to do for his brother together. The worker in the pit was his idea. Talk about a proud mama. My 7yo has inherited his mom’s sense of mischievousness. I’m sure that won’t cause any problems in the future.

Anyway, that’s it. So simple and so impressive.

The birthday boy was so excited, I had a lot of trouble keeping his hands off the cake until it was time to sing happy birthday. (As you can see he had a Mardi Gras party because the lucky little thing’s special day fell on the day of a parade which we went to as soon as the party was wrapped up). But even though we had a King Cake for everyone else, this birthday boy had to have his construction cake.

I totally recommend cutting the entire portion of the cake with the dug-out center off and just giving it to the birthday boy (or girl). Meyer ate his cake straight out of the bulldozer’s scoop and the back of the little dump truck. Adorable.

Then you can share the rest of the cake with your guests.

There you have it. A DIY construction birthday cake that even a #craftfail mom can pull off. Easy as can be and completely adorable.

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