Construction Truck Birthday Cake

Hello again! After a short (heh) break from posting so that I could enjoy the summer with my two babies, it is now October, which means that one of my babies has abruptly stopped being a baby and turned into a two-year-old. 

He started off the terrible twos just as you would expect...

I constructed this cake (pun intended) during his nap. When he woke up, I brought him into the kitchen to realize, to my horror, I had forgotten to hide the cake. As soon as he saw it, he mustered up his whiniest post-nap voice and screeched, "TRUUUUUUCK!"

Of course, I was not about to let him play with the trucks on this cake which I had just spent over an hour carefully arranging and sprinkling with Oreo crumbs. And so, he had a record breaking tantrum and spent the rest of the day hunting for the truck cake after I hid it.

But when his party finally came the next day, he had forgotten about his mad hunt for the trucks, he even forgot about the sadness of popping all three of his balloons within an hour (that hour they lasted was the best hour of his life though), and overall he forgot to be a "terrible two" when I brought that cake out with the candles lit.

That face made it all worth it. For all the terribleness of the twos, there's even more joy.

He is the funniest and sweetest little boy, even though he does have the occasional tantrum. He loves to "cook", stirring all my scraps of ingredients together in a bowl while I'm not looking. He loves to kiss and cuddle with his baby sister, and when I put him down for a nap, he misses her and calls forlornly, "Baaaaby! Baaaaby!".

One of the funniest things is that he loves chocolate chips, and if he ever catches a glimpse of the bag he shouts, "ONE MORE!". That's how many times I've said, "Just ONE more."

Anyway, I could go on about this kid all day. But you probably actually came here to hear about the cake.

Well, I will be honest, I used a cake mix. It was this gluten free one. Even though I was the only celiac present, I made it gluten free, because if I'm going to bake a cake, you better be darn well sure I'm going to eat it. It turned out great and everyone liked it and said it didn't even taste gluten free. I highly recommend.

I didn't use a recipe for the frosting, but it was basically the milk chocolate frosting from this cake, although I think I probably added more liquid this time. For the piping around the edges I just added a little bit of this dark cocoa powder to the rest of the frosting so that I would have some contrast.

I used crushed gluten free Oreos for the dirt. For the excavator truck, I just scooped out some of the cake where I wanted it to be digging and then put some more frosting in and sprinkled some cookie crumbs in. For the bulldozer, I stuck some crumbs into the side where it was pushing a pile of "dirt" off the edge.

These are the trucks I used.  They were a huge hit, as I previously mentioned.