My son is mad on Minecraft and asked for a ‘Creeper’ cake for his birthday, here’s the recipe, the instructions are on YouTube. This took me 2 full days to make, it’s not difficult, just labour intensive as making and sticking on all the ‘pixellations’ takes a long time.
You will need 3 x 8″/20cm square cakes made using the following recipe (the recipe is for 1 cake, yes there are a lot of eggs and yes it’s a huge cake when it’s finished)
For each cake:
600g soft butter or margarine
600g caster sugar
12 medium eggs
600g self raising flour
Grated zest of 3 lemons (for lemon flavoured cake, omit if you wish)
Green food colouring (I used Sugarflair Party Green)
For the frosting (this will be sufficient for all 3 cakes)
200g white vegetable fat such as Trex
800g sieved icing sugar
juice of 3 lemons
green food colouring (I used Sugarflair Party Green)
Green, brown, white and black sugarpaste (approximately 2kg green, 500g brown and a little white and black
A little royal icing
1 x 16″/40cm cake board and some matching green ribbon for the edge
Dowelling rods and thin cake bases for support
How to make a Minecraft Creeper Cake…….WASH YOUR HANDS
- Preheat the oven to 180oc/gas 4/AGA roasting oven with grid on oven floor or baking oven grid on the bottom set of runners. Grease and line an 8″/20cm square cake tin
- Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, beat the eggs and add these along with the flour, lemon zest and food colouring to the mixture, mix well.
- Transfer to the cake tin and bake for 30-40 minutes until springy to the touch and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean (AGA roasting oven place a plain cold shelf on the second set of runners and change over after 20 minutes).
- Transfer to a wire rack to cook and repeat twice more with the same recipe until you have 3 square cakes the same size.
- To make the feet and body: Cut one cake into quarters, trim the edges, top and bottom and make sure they are all the same size and thickness, cover with clingfilm and set to one side. Repeat with the second cake for the body.
- To make the frosting: beat the vegetable fat (Trex) in an electric mixer on high for 30 seconds to soften it up, add the icing sugar and lemon juice and start on a low speed to mix the icing sugar, once it’s all amalgamated turn the mixer up to high and beat for 2 minutes until the mixture doubles in volume and becomes very white. It should be soft and easy to mix, if it isn’t add more lemon juice or a little water, beat again. Add food colouring to achieve a pale to mid green colour.
- To make the pixellated tiles: Roll out 250g of the green sugarpaste and use either a clean ruler or marzipan spacers as a guide and cut squares approximately 3/4″ /2cm square, repeat with 250g brown sugarpaste. Mix a darker and light green by kneading different quantities of green, white and brown sugarpaste together, roll out and cut squares.
- To cover the feet: unwrap the feet from the clingfilm and cover each top and side of the foot with a thin layer of frosting, cut a stripe of black sugarpaste and place on the front bottom of each foot, use the coloured squares to cover the top and sides, leave to dry.
- To cover the cake base; roll out approximately 500g green sugarpaste to slightly larger than the cake base, paint the cake base with a little cool, boiled water to help the sugarpaste stick and cover, gently squeezing out any air bubbles and smoothing out with your hands, trim the edges.
- Stick the feet to the cake base with a little royal icing, you will need something in between the feet to support the body. You could use a piece of polystyrene or wood cut to size then covered with sugarpaste and squares – just remember not to eat it (!), or you could cut squares out of the feet and slot the body in between the cuts which would make it more stable (if I’d have thought of this at the time I would have done it this way)
- To cover the body: stack the four quarters on top of each other with a thin layer of frosting in between each quarter to stick them together, trim the cake stack so it’s wider at the bottom then cover the whole cake in a thin layer of frosting. Roll out 500g green sugarpaste and roll around the body, don’t worry about it being perfect this will be covered with sugarpaste icing squares.
- Cut a piece of thin cake card to fit the base and stick with a little royal icing.
- Cover the green sugarpaste with a thin layer of frosting and then cover with icing squares, leave to dry.
- To cover the head: re roll some of the leftover green sugarpaste to cover the head, again don’t worry about it being perfect as it will be covered with icing squares too. Cut 17 black squares and make these into the eyes and mouth, use the green and brown shades to fill in the rest of the head and the sides.
- Assembling the Creeper: Do this on site, do not try to transport this cake made up as it is very heavy. Place 3 dowelling rods through the body on which to attach the head. Gently place the head over the rods to secure into place – DO NOT TRY TO MOVE THE CREEPER WITH HIS HEAD ON, IT WILL NOT BE STABLE
My son’s friends thought this was AWESOME at his party and I have mega ‘cool Mum’ status with his mates because of this.