Minecraft 'cake block' birthday cake

One of my favourite cakes we have made is a Minecraft cake we made for our son's 10th birthday. This cake was quite easy. 

At first we didn't know what kind of Minecraft cake to make, as there were many types online, we considered trying to make a Creeper (a green zombie guy), but then I noticed some doing a "cake" block. Minecraft is made of blocks, kind of like Lego, and the blocks can be made of different things, like dirt, water, lava, etc. There is a special block in the game that is a "cake" block. Perfect.

After reading the Minecraft Wiki, we found out it is "made" with sponge, white icing and strawberries or red frosting. We decided sponge would be too soft and went for a vanilla cake. Two were baked in a large square pan and then butted together with icing. We made the fondant for the first time and it was as nerve wracking as I'd imagined. I really wanted the sides to have fondant as well, but we ran out of time again, grrr, I smell a theme here. 

We decided we would place the "cherries" exactly as they were on the block in the game, to be authentic...

We could have stopped there, it looked great already, but it was our boy's first double digit birthday and we wanted to celebrate that. Sneaky had received a letter and number set of cake pans and was itching to use them. So we did the 10 in chocolate cake, and made some extra bar cakes up with the same tins. These were then covered all around the sides in chocolate buttercream icing then rolled in crushed chocolate biscuit crumbs. The tops were iced with green buttercream icing and dipped in green coloured coconut. The cake board was covered in chocolate buttercream icing and crushed chocolate biscuit crumbs.

I was upset about the sides and thought it looked messy, as you can see I've tried to cover it with the dirt blocks around the sides. But we got the overall effect, we know that by our son's reaction. He absolutely loved it. After checking it out for over 5 minutes he ran over to the computer and pulled the game up, got a cake block on screen and started going back and forth checking the placement of the "cherries". Then he congratulated us on getting it right hahahaha.

This was a huge hit and I would recommend a neater version for any Minecraft lover.

Sidenote- Those candles are "magical relighting candles" that I got at the supermarket for a couple of bucks, they nearly stole the limelight and made for a hilarious birthday video.