How to Make A Digger Cake

A few weeks ago we celebrated our baby turning 3.

He absolutely loves construction trucks and always points them out to me while we're out and about.

I wanted to make him a 'digger' cake and searched for ideas.

There were a lot of good ideas where people had little trucks on the cake, but I wanted to make the actual 3D version of a truck.

This is what I came up with...

There is a time-lapse video at the end of this post showing the actual process if you want to check it out, but I'm also going to go through step-by-step here with pictures.

I used a 9x13 cake pan and an 8x8 cake pan.

After baking and cooling the cake, I wrapped it in plastic wrap and placed it in the freezer.

Once I was ready to decorate I removed it from the freezer and plastic wrap and cut the 9x13 sized cake in half.

I used a homemade vanilla buttercream for the frosting.

I placed frosting on top of the first half...

And then stacked the second piece and did a crumb coat around the whole thing.

I then cut the 8x8 piece (refer to the diagram above to see how I cut it)...

I used the two larger pieces to make the 'cab' part (shown)

and the smaller piece to make the front part. I don't know if that's the engine, or what it's considered, I just knew the digger looked better with it there.

Once the crumb coat was completed I placed the cake in the fridge to let the frosting harden and I got to work on the tracks and wheels.

I used fun-sized Kit Kats and chocolate candy melts.

I cut the Kit Kats in half and used the melted chocolate to draw a long thin rectangle that was the same size/length of the Kit Kats I had laid out.
Before the chocolate hardened, I quickly placed the Kit Kat pieces on top, flat side down.

For the 'scooper' I again used the candy melts and made a large square for the main part.

I also made two side pieces that were like long triangles, and an actual 'scoop' part that had a zig-zag edge (that would be the front bottom part of the 'scooper')

To make the rounded part of the tracks I took 5 pieces of Kit Kat and stood them upright forming a half circle, and 'glued' them in place with the melted candy melts. 

While all of the chocolate was hardening in place, I went on to frost the cake.

I tinted my buttercream frosting yellow and covered the whole digger in that color.

Once the whole cake was frosted and smoothed out I added the tracks and wheels.

I took the first row of tracks and flipped them upside down and then placed 3 mini chocolate dounts on top. I used a little bit of frosting to stick the donuts to the cake.

The other row of tracks went on top of the dounts, and I used a little more of the melted candy melts to stick them to the donuts and cake.

Lastly, I attached the half circle pieces to the front and back of each set of tracks to finish them off.

I used a little bit of leftover white frosting to make 3 windows.

One on the front and one on each side.

To assemble the scooper I used more candy melts to stick the two triangles to each side, and then the piece with the zig-zag edge to the bottom.

To attach the scooper to the front of the cake, I dipped two large toothpicks in chocolate and pushed them into the cake.

I then used more candy melts to 'glue' the scooper to the toothpicks.

The finishing touch was outlining the windows with a little bit of black frosting.

All ready to go!

Make sure to check out the timelapse below!