Leo's bulldozer birthday cake: a better guide than totally winging it from a random photo.

I was searching for some fun cake to make my nephew for his 4th birthday and came across this cake in a family blog. There were just photos and no instructions so this is my interpretation. I'm putting this together to hopefully save some time for the next people who want to wow a child.

What you need to make:

• 5 medium loaves of chocolate cake. I made a few extra and needed them because I cut things very wrong the first go-round! 5 loaves is what you need with no mistakes. 
• You trim the top off of 2 full loaves and they are the first 2 layers of the body. 
• I used 2/3 of 2  loaves for the nose of the bulldozer with one loaf having the top cut off for better stacking. 
• 1 square cake. The (um, I don't know what it's called, the "tread" maybe?) were made from one square cake cut diagonal to make 2 sides.
• 2 bags of kitkat minis. The individually wrapped ones, if you get the Halloween kind where they are in a pair, they will be too long. But maybe you can just cut them? Yeah, that won't take any time at all.
• 2 batches of cream cheese frosting and one batch of chocolate frosting.
• Orange food coloring. Actually, I was told it should have been yellow, so, you pick.
• 1 pack of Twix.
• 1 chocolate bar for the blade.
• Graham crackers to crumble for "dirt".

So, this is what it all looks like raw. I angled the treads a bit. I just stacked it with no frosting to see how everything fit. I cut inward angles in the body portion as well as the nose portion. You can see it in the next photo that is frosted.
Oh, I put this on a cookie sheet with aluminum foil.

 

 

Here you can see the body and nose frosted. I frosted between each layer so everything sticks together. I also cut indents into both the body and nose.

 

This is the step where I should have taken lots of pictures, but didn't, because I was too busy freaking out. I tried many combos of frosting and kitkats and here is what ultimately worked:

1. cut the cake the way you want it.
2. frost the perimeter and stick the kitkats on. In hindsight, I might have used that gingerbread house making frosting that is uber sticky. But I used the chocolate frosting and put it in the fridge laying down flat for about an hour to firm-up.
3. I then frosted the face of the tread with chocolate frosting and put them on either side of the body.

I then used a pastry bag deal and frosted the details on. I broke the tips of kitkats and put one full kitkat on the hood.

 

Once those treads were on, it was all easy-breezy. I assembled the blade by using 2/3 of a twix leaning up on the base of the front of the dozer. I used frosting as glue so nothing would slide around. Finally, I crushed graham crackers (with the help two 4 year-olds!) and sprinkled it around to look like the bulldozer was pushing dirt around.

 

It's not perfect, but Leo loved it! And that's all that mattered to me.

Happy cake-making!

*** I'd love to see your cake pictures and hear of what tricks you used that made this cake easier to make or turn out smoothly. ***