Mom And Kids: DIY Gold Mine Cake

Sunday, April 14, 2013

DIY Gold Mine Cake

My husband recently turned 30 years of age and we decided to have a party to celebrate!

I couldn't resist a cake challenge.

He has often spoken about the thrill he would get as a young boy when it came time for him to select a themed cake from the Australian classic Woman's Weekly Birthday Cake book, which is a well known favourite amongst many kids born in the 80s.

Being the good wifey that I am, I decided to relive a bit of that for him and since he works in mining I decided to create a gold mine cake - as you do! ;)

Possum and I hit the shops to get all the things we needed for the cake.

I was catering for about 40-50 guests so I knew I would need a big cake.

I went to our local warehouse store and bought a large board, which I then covered in CAUTION tape. This was also used as 'decoration' around the house.

I'd also purchased these mini CAT machines off eBay for a few dollars.

I also figured they would be great toys for Possum when she's older.

I prefer to keep life simple so I ordered ahead and bought three large chocolate mud cakes from Costco. Why make life hard? These cakes are seriously amazing and my oven is hopeless at cooking cakes, well that's my excuse anyway. ;)

Using a knife I roughly etched numbers into the top of the cake.

I cut one quarter of the third cake and filled in the gaps around the two other cakes.

Yes, I could have just got square cakes but I wanted a rougher look with less extra work.

Looking back I really could have also pressed in a few pieces of crunchie bar to act as gold and discovered when our guests bit into their piece. You can learn from my experience.

Again I kept it really simple and used a Betty Crocker ready made icing.

Using a spatular I iced the numbers that I'd lightly etched.

I then added chocolate sprinkles and lightly pressed it down into the icing.

I then crushed three packets of regular Oreo biscuits in the blender.

I didn't do it for long because I wanted to keep it chunky so they looked like rocks.

You can also sprinkle in a few pieces of a crunchie bar so that there are glimmers of 'gold'.

I covered the rest of the cake is sections with the icing and lightly

pressed in the crushed Oreo biscuits.

For a bit of fun I cut a deep hole into the sides of the cake.

I did this so it would look like one of the CAT trucks were exiting the mine with gold, which was the crushed up crunchie bar, and another machine was entering on the right.

(sorry - I'm not so good on the terminology of CAT machines - haha)