For my son’s 7th birthday I wanted to make a digger construction birthday cake but I am a once a year theme cake baker so it needed to be something relatively simple!

I obviously went to Pinterest to gather some ideas and amalgamated a few options to come up with an easy cake for me to make.

The cake is made up of 2 sections – for the bottom section I made a standard Victoria sponge cake but used the  traditional method of mixing the butter (actually Stork) and caster sugar, before adding the eggs,  self-raising flour and other ingredients. I made sure I whisked the eggs first and also sifted the flour.

Ingredients

As I was using a big 9 inch tin I did two bakes each with the following ingredients:

140g caster sugar
140g butter/Stork
3 eggs
140g self-raising flour
1 level tsp baking powder
2 tblsp milk

I cooked each cake for around 20 minutes at 175 degrees C.

These cakes came out really nicely – soft, fluffy and moist. I let them cool off and then levelled them so that I could stack them. I used a filling of jam and buttercream.

Once this bottom layer was flat I put a crumb coat of butter icing over it, rolled out one 250g pack of yellow fondant icing and covered the cake with that. I then rolled out some black icing, cut it into strips and applied those with some milk as a kind of glue.

For the top layer I made a chocolate cake. I don’t make many chocolate cakes I have to admit as I don’t really eat them but I’m so glad I got this recipe from BBC Good Food as it was really tasty (maybe with the yoghurt added it was more moist?).

I halved the ingredients shown in the recipe (as I only had one smaller but deep 7 inch cake tin) and made 2 cakes (I whisked the 3 eggs up and measured out half of that mixture for each cake). These cakes rose really well so I had a fair amount of spare bits to eat when I levelled the cakes off!

The chocolate butter cream was really tasty – I just made half as I was planning on covering the cake in yellow fondant.

I used some of the butter cream for a crumb coat and then used another 250g pack of yellow fondant (plus a bit that was left from the base) to cover it.

Then it was just a case of digging out some of the cake and making it into crumbs. I had given a couple of my son’s toys a good clean to use on the cake and had bought some cute cones from Amazon. I already had a box of letter cutters that I had bought a few years ago so used some more black icing to make his name.

As I say, I am pretty much a once  year baker but was happy with how this turned out and he loved it too!

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