Stampy Longnose Minecraft Cake

A challenging cake, tall and unstable, extremely chocolatey, lots of fiddly bits...but extremely delicious and most importantly the kids thought it was great

Well at least halfway through the year it became more than apparent that this years birthday cake was going to be square! Minecraft has overtaken our household, as it has of many of the other homes I know. Along with that comes the obsession with Stampy, a young man from Bristol who started vlogging his game play with his cat character on Minecraft and has become an international success and while I will never understand why kids are so obsessed with this game which looks like it was made for a Commodore 64 I must admit the You Tube videos of Stampy's exploits with his friends i-Ballistic Squid and Amy Lee (amongst others) are quite amusing and a little addictive!

As the new kitchen didn't go in until the end of November, I had given very little thought to planning, so I hold my hands up and say I googled it.  

Googling Minecraft cakes gives a lot to choose from. I knew I wanted the cake to look like a Minecraft block and Lauren had requested a Stampy theme. So choosing this pixelated picture to sit on top of the block seemed like an ideal combination - especially as I am rubbish at making icing figures.

Next came the quandary over cake ingredient measurements, temperatures and timings. I have lots of cake recipes, but not many quantities and timings for a square cake tin. I have experience of it not quite working out right.

However, I found this recipe which made the most amazing chocolate cake, moist but not in an oily or sticky way (I'm not a fan of mud cake preferring a more spongy texture). You can find the recipe here on Allrecipes. I added some chocolate blocks before putting the mix in the tins - a mix of white, milk and dark. I used a 23cm tin and made 3 layers (3 lots of recipe - you don't need to make this much).

Next I made some chocolate butter cream by mixing 250g lighter butter, with cocoa and icing sugar in my food processor until I got my preferred colour, texture and taste.

I sandwiched the 3 layers together with a thin layer of butter cream, making sure the top layer was tin side up (the flat side) - you may need to level what was the top with a bread knife so it sits well on the middle layer..

The design for Stampy's face is 8 blocks wide and 9 deep and I had a 2 cm square cutter to cut the icing squares, so I cut a piece of greaseproof paper 16 x 18 cm and positioned it on top of the stack of cake.  I used a sharp bread knife cut the cake to size. This left a lot of very tasty off cuts which I took into work, but you could freeze to have with custard or to make cake pops. 

Once the cake was assembled and cut to size I completely covered it with the butter cream. 

Then I rolled and cut a piece of white icing 16 x 18cm and stuck that on top of the cake, the butter cream keeps it there.

You can decorate the sides how you like, I used squares of icing, chocolate vermicelli (messy and difficult to get on the sides) and halves of Maltesers to give a Micecrafty, soily look.

The final stage is to cut the squares from Regal Ice. You will need orange, black, grey, white and green. As you can see from mine I didn't get the neatness I had imagined - see this cake for a pristine version...but don't beat yourself us about it - at least one blogger admitted that her top layer wasn't real cake which would help! You can help yourself by using guides to get the thickness's all the same. I used icing sugar and water to make a paste to glue the squares into position.

You need to keep the cake somewhere cool until your children (or young at heart grown up) is ready to eat it.

Trimmings!