Rubik's Cube Cake

My brother Jeff and his wife Ann host a fabulous Super Bowl party at their house every year. Lots of people come, and a grand time is had by all. It's a pot-luck party, and everybody brings great food. Usually, the actual Super Bowl ends up being anti-climactic, compared to all the fun and food!

Our cousin Steve's son Ryan loves Rubik's cubes. So this year, for the Super Bowl party, Jeff made a cake in the form of a Rubik's Cube. Here's a picture of the finished product. Isn't it amazing?

Here's how he made it.

Ingredients:
3 boxes of Betty Crocker cake mix.  Jeff used 2 boxes of Super Moist Milk Chocolate and 1 of French Vanilla, but said he got the best results from the French Vanilla
1 container Betty Crocker Milk Chocolate Icing
2 containers Betty Crocker Whipped Vanilla Icing
2 tubes black Cake Mate icing
1 tube each red, blue, green, yellow, orange, and white Cake Mate icing

First, Jeff baked the cakes.  He followed the instructions on the box, but to each mix added one extra egg, and used 1/2 cup less water than called for.  He baked each cake into two 8 x 8 layers.

He let the cakes cool, and, using a long serrated bread knife, cut the rounded tops off each layer where it had risen so that each layer was perfectly flat.  He also measured all the layers, to be sure that, when stacked on top of one another, it would form a cake that was roughly as high as it was square, so that it formed a cube. 

Now he stacked the layers together, adding a coating of frosting between the layers (milk chocolate frosting between the chocolate layers, whipped vanilla frosting between the vanilla layers).  At that point, he had a cake that was roughly in the shape of a cube.

Next he covered the entire outside of the cake with the whipped vanilla frosting.  Now, since the pans had sides that were slightly sloped, and since Jeff did not trim the edges (doing so would have made the cake too high), there were some pretty large gaps on the sides between the layers.  These gaps were filled in with frosting, so that the cake was a perfect cube.  (Jeff says that people who get end pieces will get as much icing as they will cake!)


Jeff refrigerated the cake overnight so that the frosting would solidify on the outside.  The next day, he used the two tubes of black Cake Mate icing to draw squares on each face of the cube.  Then, using a well-twisted Rubik's cube as a model, he filled in each square with one of the six tubes of colored frosting.

The colored frosting tubes came with plastic nozzles that made the application of the colored frosting easier.

Congratulations on a fabulous-looking cake, Jeff!  I just wish I could be there to see Ryan's face when he sees it.