Digger Cake

My baby brother turned 21 on Saturday. Most of our family gathered in Rotorua to celebrate. He wanted a low-key affair - barbeque and beer on his deck - but he did agree to having a cake, which Mum and I volunteered to make. My brother works as an apprentice for a big company that manufactures and services construction equipment, so there was really only one option for a cake for him - a digger (I think this one is technically called a scoop loader...):



I'd found a few pictures of other digger cakes on flickr, but in the end we sort of made it up as we went along. The icing was yellow buttercream. I used two sizes of chocolate biscuits for the wheels. The arms attaching the scoop to the main part of the digger are licorice logs, as is the exhaust. The windows are made from an icecream container, cut to size and then outlined with black icing. The dirt/rocks in front are chocolate covered raisins.

Here's the chocolate cake shapes, prior to icing.

And here is the icing, fresh from the Kenwood mixer. We used a ridiculous amount of colouring to get the yellow we needed. Luckily the buttercream was so sweet that most people only ate the cake and not the icing so I'm not feeling too guilty about poisoning everyone with artifical colouring.