Minecraft Birthday Cake 2.0 {Checkerboard Cake}

Minecraft Birthday Cake 2.0

The other day I blogged about the easy way to make a Minecraft Birthday Cake, which I made for my niece last summer. Last month, my nephew decided he also wanted a Minecraft cake for his birthday, but his ideas were a little more complex:

Blueprints

He drew these blueprints when we were out for lunch at Jack Astor’s, and I snapped a pic so I would remember what he wanted {insert the crying while laughing emoji}. You can see my annotations in purple, where I was trying to understand what each component was: grass, sand, water and dirt. I figured I would make the base as a cake, and the rest with rice krispie squares, like I did for his Wrecking Ball cake a couple of years ago. Here’s what I did:

Baked four 8×8″ square layers of cake, to be the base of the cake
Mixed up two 8×8″ pans of rice krispie squares which I basically then cut and shaped into the correct size blocks I needed
I made a double batch of My Favourite Buttercream and tinted the majority of it green for the base, reserving about 1 cup to die blue for the water layer and left about 1 cup plain for “glue” for the sand and dirt layers
For the sand, I spread icing on my rice krispie shape and pressed in graham cracker crumbs. I did the same for the dirt shape, using Oreo crumbs instead.
I stacked everything up very carefully, then used a small star tip and green icing to make the grass
My sister-in-law added little Minecraft guys, and Matthew’s vision was complete

Checkerboard Inside

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, I also decided to make the base of the cake as a Checkerboard Cake. Two of my layers were vanilla cake tinted green, and two were chocolate. It’s too hard to explain how to do this, so I’ll direct you to this video, which I followed exactly (except I used chocolate icing instead of ganache). The hardest part was just having the patience to do all the measuring and cutting, but I wouldn’t say it was that difficult to execute. I was the most excited of all to cut into the final cake and see what it looked like inside!

Matthew