Son's 2nd Birthday: How to make a digger cake

Am I mad, we have a small house and I had 17 people including ourselves to feed and entertain for our son's second birthday! My little boy is mad about diggers, and I love to make birthday cakes myself rather than buy them from shops. Saves a bit of cash and I think they taste nicer! I had looked at photos of digger cakes for ideas and was shocked to find all these 3D masterpieces so had to find something a lot simpler, because I knew the cake would be on the floor the night before my son's birthday if I even attempted to try and make a 3d cake!

Building site cake
Anyway this is what I came up with, 2 rectangle tins each with a 4 egg sponge mix in, cooked & cooled. Then iced with a melted dark chocolate butter icing between the two layers and all over the outside sponge. I scooped out 1/2 a layer of sponge in the centre of the cake, placed a toy digger next to the hole and placed some of the spare sponge in the bucket of the digger. With a toy dumper truck I ran the wheels over the icing and then mixed the rest of the spare sponge with some butter icing so it looked a bit like mud and placed into the dumper truck.

I then decorated the cake with some chocolate covered honeycomb pieces to look like boulders, and used chocolate fingers to create a wall in one corner of the cake,placing them so they overlapped and using icing to 'cement' them down.

I had some ready roll icing left over from another cake and coloured this yellow, rolled, and cut into a wavy line, wrote with some tube icing and lightly placed onto the cake. In hindsight it would have been easier to write on the icing after it was placed onto the cake though!

The cake was a great success with my son (the diggers didn't stay on the cake for long after blowing out the candles) and we had plenty left over even though some had seconds at the party! I always try and make my cakes slightly larger than I need so I have some leftover ;)

The diggers came in a pack of 4 from a bargain store, didn't use all of them although could have, so my son got an extra present as well as a big cake!