Minecraft Birthday Cake

Like most boys his age (and everyone else, apparently), Jay is really into Minecraft.  My mom always made us the most perfect birthday cakes in the style of whatever character we were obsessed with.  I remember loving my Barbie Doll birthday cake and my all time favorite was Rainbow Brite!   To follow in her tradition, I always do the same for my kids.  So, of course, I had to make Jay a Minecraft birthday cake.

I checked out all the blogs and got some ideas.  Most of what I saw were large square cakes made to look like the grass block.  But I wanted it to look like the scenes that I actually see Jay building all the time so this is what I came up with. 

Supplies:
Durable Chocolate Cake Recipe
12 x 18 sheet cake pan
Wilton Food Writers
Butter cream Frosting
Chocolate Frosting
Wilton 12 inch disposable decorating bags
Wilton tip coupler
Wilton tip #233 (grass tip)
4- 4oz. packages of Berry Jello
Rice Krispies Treats


I used this recipe for the Durable Chocolate Cake.  It was yummy and easy to cut and move around.  I doubled the recipe and used a 12 x 18 sheet cake pan.  I flipped it onto a cooling rack and let it cool for about 30 minutes.  The lines that the cooling rack made on the cake came in handy when cutting and building this cake.  This is when I had to bring in the big guns, Jamie,  because my mind just doesn't work like this.  I wanted to use all this cake and make multiple layers.  So Jamie used the Wilton Food Writers to draw where to cut and where to put the cut layers.

While he was doing that, I was making the butter cream frosting and adding the green food coloring to get it to just the right shade of green for the grass.  It dried a little darker than what it looks like here.

Once the layout was set, I used some chocolate icing in between the layers to help them to stay put.  Then I filled the Wilton decorating bag with the green icing and used the coupler and tip #233 to make the grass on the tops of the blocks.  Then added the sand blocks (Rice Krispies Treats) and the water blocks (Berry Jello).  I ended up not using all the Rice Krispies Treats or all of the Jello but I wish I had saved all the extras because the kids wanted to eat all of that too!   I also wish I had put a layer of green icing on the cake before I did the grass so I wouldn't have had severe hand cramping from trying to cover every part of the cake!

I was going to print out these 3D Minecraft Characters to put on the cake but I ran out of time and Jay ended up putting his vinyl Steve in there.  In this picture, you can see the water blocks a little better.

And here are the boys playing Minecraft together on their IPhones, IPads and Kindles.  I didn't even know that you could link up and play together!  Remember when you had to wait your turn to play the old Nintendo 64?  And you would just hope and pray it didn't start acting funky because you'd have to do the Nintendo blow to fix it!  Ahh, the good old days!