Bulldozer Cake with Kit-Kats

We just celebrated my son's 3rd birthday! He is REALLY into construction machinery, so I found a cute bulldozer cake on Pinterest to make. See it here. Unfortunately, there were no instructions associated with it, so I thought I'd post my own "template." Here is my finished product:

I used 2 boxed cake mixes (chocolate, of course!) and baked my cakes in 2 batches using an 8" square pan and a loaf pan (about 4 1/4" x 8 1/2"). So for the first batch, I split one box of cake batter evenly between the two pans. Repeat for second cake mix. (*HINT: use wet Wilton bake-even strips or simply an old bath towel cut into strips and pinned along the outside of the pan to make the cake bake more levelly. This will reduce the amount of loss from leveling them off.)

Ignore the fact they're still dirty!

Once the cakes are cooled and leveled, stack the two loaf pan cakes together to make the body of the truck. Since they will be beveled, I put the big ends together:

Since the loaf pan's sides are not straight (perpendicular to the base) like my square pan, it creates a natural bevel without having to carve it with a knife and deal with frosting the delicate cut surfaces.

For the cab part, I cut up an 8" square cake. After baked, it measured approximately 7 3/4" so I cut one strip about wide enough to fit the top of body (about 4"), then cut that exactly in half (so I had two "squares" about 4" by 3 3/4"). The rest of that cake will be extra for snacking!

This seemed to be a good size so the cab was somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 the length of the body.

For the treads, I used the second 8" cake. Dimensions per tread were as follows: A= 1/2"  B= 7 3/4" (uncut side of 8" cake which baked down do this size) C= 1 1/2" (The height will seem small but after the Kit-Kats are added above and beneath it, it will add an entire 1" to the height).

Obviously not to scale, bear with me.

*Note: My treads were only about 1" wide (the height of the leveled 8" cake) so you will have to push the kit kats into the cake a bit so they don't stick out further than the cake.

I used about 2 full bags of the kit kat miniatures.

Use two kit kats for the lights and something for the exhaust pipe (we used a black pen with the ink tube removed- it was even hollow like a pipe!). I used a full regular sized Hershey bar for the blade. Crumble up some of the extra cake (if you used chocolate) and pile it up in front of the blade on some frosting.

Viola! A fun construction cake for your little boy (or whoever!). My little guy's name is Beau, so I wrote "Beau-dozer" on the blade! :) It's been a month since his birthday, and he still talks about his bulldozer cake- it was quite a hit!

Happy decorating!

~Natalie