Minecraft Birthday Cake

This cake was a total last minute design. I found out two days before her birthday, that my sister-in-law wouldn't mind if we brought a cake to my niece's birthday. She gave us a lot of freedom of design and flavor. Just please bring a cake. Okay.

Now, I know my niece well enough to know that she wouldn't like anything too girly. What does she like? Well, her favorite computer game is Minecraft, which she spends much of her free time playing. I knew I had to make her a Minecraft cake. Or at least attempt it with the short notice.

I wanted to do some sort of square checkerboard, but I decided against it in the end just because I didn't really have the time to make it. So, I went with one layer of chocolate and one layer green vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream. I baked them in my ten inch square pans, which has rounded corners. I trimmed the edges off to make them straight and give the cake square corners instead of rounded.
 

 Then I crumb coated the cake in chocolate buttercream and put it in the fridge to set up.

 In the meantime, I rolled out my first piece of fondant, a dark brown chocolate fondant, and cut it into 2x2cm squares.

 If you're wondering if I made too many, the answer is no. In fact, I ran out at the end and had to make more.

 Then I iced the cake, trying to keep the corners as sharp as I could.

 I began placing the squares I had cut beginning in the corner and going around the bottom of the cake using two colors of brown.

 Then, I placed the next row directly on top of the first ones. I was trying to get the squares to look like random-ish pixels.

 Then I cut out gray squares to form the number 13. I wanted to put my niece's name on it, because she does have a short name, but any name is too long for the number of pixels I had to work with. So, I decided to just stick with the number.

 I placed the number as close to centered as it gets on a 10x10 pixel cake.

 Then I cut out some grass green squares and mixed my dark green with grass green to get a green that's not quite as dark as it was.

 Then I cut out dark green squares and filled in the gaps from the grass green.

 And randomly placed them where I hadn't gotten to yet.

 I filled in the gaps with grass green and used my fondant smoother to just tap the cake, not rub, to help the squares to all lay flat.

 I think it turned out decent considering how little time I had to think about it and get any preparations done.

 If I ever did a Minecraft cake again, I would cut out the squares ahead of time and let them dry at least overnight to give me sharper edges, but with what I had to work with, I thought it didn't turn out half bad.