Living like Martha: Construction Cake

My boyfriend started a construction company this year (Insert shameless plug here: Looking for the perfect general contractor in the Bay Area? Just email brett@nbbuildersinc.com) and a few weeks back I decided to make a cake in celebration of the company’s recent success. I found this adorable recipe and modified it slightly. I wanted to actually bake the cake instead of buying pound cake, and I also wanted to make the size a little larger, so I made chocolate cake and filled both a 9 X 5 and a 5 X 6 pan with the cake mix. (I just cut the 5 X 6 cake in half and placed one half on top of the 9 X 5 cake to make the cab of the excavator.)

The recipe above doesn’t provide you with a buttercream recipe, so I used this one. This recipe didn’t end up making quite enough frosting so I doubled the ingredients (and then had a little too much). I tried creating a short cut with the chocolate frosting by adding cocoa powder to the vanilla buttercream. Bad idea. It made the frosting dry and crumbly, which left squeezing perfect lines of chocolate frosting out of the pastry bag nearly impossible.

Because of the chocolate frosting mishap and the fact that I was running short on time to get the cake over to his job site, I didn’t finish all the decorations. But overall, I think it came out pretty cute.