Eli’s Construction Themed First Birthday Cake

Eli’s Construction Themed First Birthday Cake

You may or may not know that I have three boys.  My middle son, especially, loves playing in the dirt.  It’s almost as if there is a magnetic pull that draws him to dirt.  Then it goes straight to his face.  I cannot keep him away from it.  So, I am pretty familiar with all things dirt, rocks, and construction vehicles.

When Julianne told me that they were leaning in the direction of a construction theme for her son, Eli’s, first birthday, I knew that it was right up my alley! Dump trucks, excavators, and bulldozers–I know them well.  Julianne gave me free reign with design (yay!), so I went to work getting the cake idea in my head down on to paper.

 

Eli’s birthday cake was two different flavors.  When you’re only turning one year old, you don’t have much of an opinion when it comes to cake flavors.  This is a total win for the parents! Mom chose chocolate with salted caramel buttercream and dad chose almond with raspberry buttercream (they also added on lemon cupcakes with blackberry buttercream, my fav!).

 

The outside of the cake was vanilla buttercream that I colored blue to look like the sky and to serve as a color contrast to the typical construction colors–black, yellow, and orange.  All of the decorations, including the construction vehicles, were hand cut or hand shaped out of fondant.

The “dirt” is actually just what cake decorators and designers call cake scraps.  When building a cake that you want to have nice, clean, crisp edges and a flat top, you generally have to trim off some cake from the top to level it.  The cake that is cut off is your cake scraps.  The baker and her family LOVE the cake scraps and they don’t hang around for very long (and I’m totally NOT speaking from experience here…*wink, wink).  In this case, I knew that I needed to use some of the chocolate cake as “dirt” for the outside of the cake, so I forced myself to set some aside.  When I was ready to add the “dirt”, I simply crumbled the cake and sprinkled it on top of the “rock” piles and then in a few places around the cake edges.

Then I ate the rest of the cake scraps.

Eli, I hope that you had a fantastic first birthday and that your friends and family loved celebrating with you!



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