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
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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For an event we were running as a PTA we wanted to sell monster donuts to the children and adults who were coming so we looked around for a recipe for monster doughnuts that we could easily make.
If, like me, you are trying to do your bit to reduce your waste footprint on the planet and reuse whatever you can, then this is just a small way to help with one of those things that can create unneeded plastic waste at kids birthday parties.
so that is always an option, but I wanted to go one step further and make my own. 
