Goose's Bulldozer Cake

Oh my. It does seem hard to find the time to sit down at the computer for much of anything these days.

But I have finally managed to get here to put up the pictures of Goose's cake. I do hope to write a nice post about how wonderful his birthday was and get some pictures of our happy little three year old man up for everyone to enjoy. But for the moment, here is the little how-to on our favorite family bull-duh-zoder cake... uh, I mean bulldozer cake. ;o)

First, prepare one box of your favorite flavor cake mix. We prefer white cake around here, but for the actual bulldozer, you can get whatever you want. Divide the batter up into two mini loaf pans and one regular size bread loaf pan. If you don't have those handy, you can just use a 9x13 and do some creative cutting later.

And while you're in the cake making stage, you should prepare ahead one 9x13 chocolate cake and one box of chocolate pudding. You'll use these later.

Once the loaves are baked and cooled, cut the rounded tops off of all the loaves. I then put the big loaf upside down on my tray for the main dozer, and use one mini loaf for the cab, and one mini loaf for the scoop - that scoop one I like to cut at a bit of an angle to make it look scoop-like.

Voila!

The next step is to decorate the dozer. We like to make yellow frosting, use chocolate donut wheels and licorice tracks. I get a little tube of black decorating icing for the details.

Now it's time to get out that chocolate cake and chocolate pudding, for the "mud." I used about half of the cake, and maybe 2/3 of the pudding, though you can use as much as you want to make as much mud as you want. Personally, I think the mud is the tastiest part of the cake! Toss some chunks of the cake into a bowl, and spoon globs of the pudding on top. Then mix it all up until you are happy with the consistency (and taste!) of your mud.

Then start putting the mud around your decorated dozer. Have fun and make it look good. Dirt is always a good thing. ;o)

And that's about it. Now you should have a cute little bulldozer in a nice bed of muddy goo. We stick a few plastic construction figures around and add some finishing touches like the age and name of the birthday boy...

And the final result is one very happy three year old boy! The cake was by far the highlight of Goose's entire birthday. He was so stinking cute about it!

And just as a suggestion, we found that taking bites of the chocolate mud at the same time with bites of our favorite raspberry sorbet was REALLY good. Gourmet good. But that was just our grown up preference. The kids were happy to slop bites of all and every little bit in their mouths without differentiating between flavors.

So there you go. Bulldozer cake. It's a good thing.