The Making: Minecraft Cake

Hi again! Let me present to you one of the hardest cakes I had to make. A MINECRAFT cake. For those of you who are not familiar with this word, well, basically it's a pc game about building anything by placing  blocks together. Anywhoo.. let's just say that making this cake also had the same concept for me. I was literally building it piece by piece. It took me a whole week to prepare and finish the cake. The main feature of this cake is the mosaic arrangement of each piece of coloured fondant and lemme tell ya, it ain't no walk in the park LOL! I found myself pushing myself when I thought I couldn't do it anymore but the end result was so sastisfying that I concluded that if I could do this cake, I can do ANY cake in the world!!

So I started with the figurines of course. The client wanted a lot of character figurines based on the cake. Here you see the body of a sheep...

..a chicken..oh I'll show you the rest once it's done..

Basically I had to prepare several colours that were cut in equally sized fondant squares. Overall it took me 3 days to do this. There was 3 different shades of green,3 different shades of brown, yellow,red, grey.black and white. Overall there were over a thousand little 1cm squares..so I was pretty much eating, thinking and dreaming of squares by the third night.

Here's how I did it. Basically I printed out a template of squares of the size of cake that I wanted which in this case was a 9" by 9" square block of stacked chocolate moist cake with ganache. I taped wax paper on top of it and laid the piece of fondant on top and cut it using the grid as guidance.

To make the mosaic panels of the cake. I taped the wax paper unto the grid template again and randomly arranged the fondant squares one by one to resemble the "grass" block which is a prominent feature in this game.This took me another two days to complete.

I had prepared the cake earlier and now was ready to stack it on top of each other.

Once stacked, it looked like this.

Then I used pieces of paper which I cut out to the measurement that I wanted and started carving away to get lovely sharp edges so that the cake would resemble a cube.

This is how it looked like once it was done.

Meanwhile, I prepared the board.

After covering the cake with ganache, I started sticking the mosaic panels to the side of the cake. This part was tricky because you had to make sure the little fondant squares did not fall apart while doing this process. Basically I lifted the panel slowly using a square cake board making sure that the bottom part was edged closely to the bottom of the cake. Notice that the wax paper was still sticking to the fondant once I got it firmly against the cake.

Using a fondant smoother, I quickly but gently pressed it against the side of the cake and smoothed it over. The chocolate ganache helped in securing the panel to the cake itself.

Here you see all 4 sides are done except for the top.

The top was done the same way but the only difference is instead of using a cake board to transfer the panel on top, I just slid the fondant panel gently on top. Sorry forgot to take a pic of that.:)

There were also two additional blocks of cake that were to go on top of the cake.

One of them was the TNT cake which is also another feature in the game. The other was a 'minecraft block cake'.

Of course I had to to do the minecraft logo. I printed the logo and traced it using the pin prick method and cut it along the dots.

Next up the birthday message to the American birthday boy Beckett:)

*Panting now* well there you have it a MINECRAFT themed cake.

From the front.

There's the completed sheep.

The pig.

A custom made Beckett minecraft figurine.

A minecraft creeper.

View from the top. You can see the features of the "minecraft cake' here also made using fondant squares.

The completed chicken

Client also wanted other minecraft features on the sides of the cake..like the axe. You could see that the weight of the cakes on top was stressing the fondant panels of the sides of the cakes. Plus the humidity at that particular time didn't help much even when I put the air conditioning on full blast. Not my finest work but  it was hard to control that I guess (despite dowelling to support the cakes) but at least the cake didn't fall apart. Just one of those 'meh' cake days ya know? ;P

The age of the birthday boy.

And a sword.

A closer look at the TNT dynamite.

*Crawling by now*...Yup a minecraft cake. A super duper challenging cake to make but I was proud of it all the same! (...would still think twice before I do another one though haha!)