Minecraft Creeper Cake

It has been so insanely busy with everything this summer that I have not had any time to blog. 

I hope you all had a wonderful summer! Hope you were able to get outside in the wonderful sunshine, try something new, and make lifelong memories! We made quite a few - like visiting Crater Lake, camping at the beach for the 4th, and many hot days grabbing ice cream. It was wonderfully perfect but BUSY! 

It's kind of nice to get back to a regular schedule but I do miss them while they're gone.

But anyway...back to the fun cake stuff :) 

I don't normally bake very much during the summer but because it was my son's birthday I told him I'd make him whatever cake he would like. It kind of became a challenge to see how creative he could get. Hahaha! It was fun though. 

He ended up settling on a MineCraft Creeper. Now, having never seen the game before (we bought it for him for his birthday, so I know what it is now but didn't then) I took this as a great chance for my son to be more hands on as well. He showed me a few pictures (for those of you that don't know, a 'Creeper' is one of the bad guys on the MineCraft game. This game is a Pixalized world where you can dig, build, and create whatever you'd like. My kids love it. It's creative and relatively non violent). 

We decided to make it look Pixalized by using many green squares put together to create his face. 

We started out with marshmallow fondant (melted marshmallows, water, and powdered sugar) 

and slowly started adding green to it...

... until we had MANY shades of green to work with.

I rolled it out thinly and had my son help me cut squares. This is the part where the dreaded MATH comes in. My cake was a 6in square. I made my fondant squares 1/2in each, requiring me to make 12x12=144 little squares to cover the top. I ended up making 200 because some break, or don't quite fit perfectly, or was the wrong color. It gave me some more flexibility when making it...it did require a bit more time though. 

I had to layer them to get them all on 2 plates but I got them on there. I made sure they could dry out a little more, which helped when constructing the cake. 

He also wanted a few TNT bricks to go around the base of the cake. I made some of the marshmallow fondant red, formed little squares, wrapped them with white fondant, made a little 'banana peel' topper and then wrote TNT on the front with some red food coloring. 

We frosted the cake with some simple green buttercream frosting and started placing on our squares. They weren't quite perfect but they did the trick, and honestly ended up looking a heck of a lot like the real Creeper. 

I used some black piping gel to paint the face on, and the '11' on the front. I also used a grass tip to make a pretty little border around the bottom. After placing the TNT bricks around the base, it's finished! :) yay! 

AND not only did it look great but it was absolutely delicious!!!! We had to make the cake green too! Couldn't resist. It was such a big hit! 

Can't wait to see what kind of creative cake theme he comes up with next year!!! :)