A very special friend had a "LegoLand" party for his seventh birthday. As usual, my gift was a chocolate-chocolate cake: two layers of Dorie Greenspan's buttermilk chocolate party cake (from Baking: From My Home to Yours) and standard American decorator chocolate icing. This cake is dead simple and quite delicious (even better with whipped ganache icing), but it needed to be special, and it needed to be Lego.

The "cake made of Lego" illusion is a very easy to create.

I used five colors left over from other projects: red, yellow, green, purple and white. I kneaded a two-inch diameter ball of each color, then ran it through my pasta machine, down to setting three. At this point, I use the past machine more for fondant than I do for pasta. It will be thinner than used for covering a cake; it's a good thickness for detail work.

Using the ribbon roller/cutter from the Wilton fondant class kit (which you can buy on line without taking the class), I made two half-inch wide strips of each color. This is actually a bit taller than the real bricks, but there is no one-eighth inch spacer and I didn't have time to gerry-rig something. These cuts were free hand, and not perfectly straight, but the "bricks" were easily straightened out after being cut to the proper size.

Using real two-, three-, four-, six- and eight-dot long bricks, I cut at least two of each size from each color with a paring knife. The knife cut more cleanly and straighter than the plastic roller used for freehand cutting. Cut two "bricks" of the same size at the same time for more efficient brick manufacture. Cover the the cut fondant with a damp paper towel.

The cake was baked, crumb-coated and frozen the weekend before. For the next cake, I would give the full, final coat of icing before applying the bricks just to have more icing on the fondant pieces. They fondant adhered well to the crumb coat.

Starting from the bottom, with the longer bricks, I applied them carefully to the cake, straightening the edges as much as possible. As you can see in the close-up below, the edges were not overly square and didn't always match up perfectly. A damp paper towel was very useful in wiping off stray icing from my fingers and the white (always the white) bricks. After putting on a row of bricks, careful smoothing helped the bricks to stick to the cake and form a flatter surface. The upper layers used the smaller bricks.

The pyramid shape worked well, looking fairly realistic for a construction zone. A rectangle would have worked as well. Every kid wanted some bricks on their slice, and more of the cake should have been covered in bricks. It's not like there weren't enough bricks to go around the cake. The bricks went all the way to the top so that the top icing would push over the edge and mask it.

Once the fondant was on the cake, I iced the top, making sure the top icing spilled over. For the sides, I started at one end of the brickwork, and iced around the sides to the other end of brickwork, making sure the icing overlapped the fondant. Piped shell borders made this look like a normal cake from the front.

For the finishing touch, we used two Lego construction workers. The one with the wheelbarrow is bringing more icing. (We bought the birthday boy a new Lego set; if this had been for my son, his existing construction workers would have gone through the dishwasher.)

The cake would also work with the chef mini-figure, and perhaps some "construction zone" tape made from ribbons of yellow fondant. That's the next birthday.