Lego Cake

Ricardo approached me with a challenge- Franklyn, his son, was approaching his 3rd birthday, and he wanted a LEGO-themed cake. After asking a few questions, I found that Franklyn's LEGO theme was city police; also, he loved chocolate and vanilla cake.
I brainstormed LEGO ideas and what makes so them unique to kids and adults? I jotted down a few reasons, and this one struck out the most-

LEGO is about building an environment. You can create a story from your imagination, or you can choose to follow a set of instructions. So! why not set a scene where Franklyn 'builds' his own action scene and completes the cake?

Whilst the idea was clear, the challenges lay ahead-

• Lego is brightly coloured. How do I accomplish this with ONLY natural colours?
• How will I structure the cake to look like buildings?
• Small secret; I'm not great a fondant.

Here's what I came up with:

• I naturally coloured the icing with ingredients such as freeze-dried raspberries, turmeric and blue spirulina, but I had to be careful they don't overpower the flavour of the cake.
• The vanilla cake was iced with vanilla frosting and studded with crunchy milk chocolate pearls. It had to be sturdy enough to be 6 layers tall. I shaped the blocks on a lego base plate to mimic the LEGO scene and created roofs from the offcuts of the cake buildings.
• Instead of fondant, I tempered chocolate then used it to mould and shape the LEGO-style blocks and cut the shapes for the columns and signage for the buildings.

To top it off, I created a "secret document" file where Franklyn had to build the policeman's car and choose a scene or make up his own to position the Robber. Whilst the hours of planning took up to 2 weeks, the construction took 3 full days from sourcing out the toys, the base plate up until finishing off the secret file.
The best part? Seeing Franklyn's reaction to the cake.