He did it, folks. He bloody did it. Hamish Blake‘s iconic “cake night” saw the man battle splitting sponge and pixel nightmares to produce a Minecraft-themed cake for his son, Sonny. And it only took 10 hours and the best part of a bottle of Tasmanian whiskey.
Hamish posted to Instagram on Friday morning announcing that he was off to the shops to buy the ingredients for “cake night”, which is when he makes whatever cake his kids request for their birthdays — no matter how bonkers or difficult it sounds.
This time, Hamish made a game-themed cake for his son’s 10th birthday party.
The criteria for the cake were as follows: It must have a…
- Minecraft-style landscape (if you somehow don’t know what Minecraft is, it’s a building game where the aesthetic is blocky and pixelated)
- Stack of TNT that “really explodes”
- Roblox guy who’s “dabbing”
Simple. Right?
Not so fast. The first issue was when Hamish took his “freshly baked cakes” out of the “oven” (read: bakery-produced cakes out of the washing machine) to find one of them had split.
“This is where we learn that drawing things is easier than sculpting them from cake,” he said on Instagram stories.
With some swift “rethinking of maths”, he managed to rejig the cake layers, and learnt an important lesson on the way: “When the cake starts pushing you around, you remember, it’s just made of cake. It was shoving me around saying, ‘You can’t go to four levels’, but we might get to five levels, you don’t know.”
So true, king.
The next set-back came in the form of Minecraft’s pixelated style. “It’s not just shapes,” Hamish said. “It’s little pixels. It’s a lot of cubes, but it’s also a lot of little mini squares within those cubes. In cake context that’s very annoying.”
As it turns out, cutting icing into teeny tiny little shapes is both time consuming and very painful. “I have to tell you, this has taken an hour,” Hamish said around midnight, showing off a few brown squares of icing. “These brown shapes. It’s Tetris. It’s shit Tetris. It’s Tetris made of shit.”
It was around 2am that Hamish got to the fun bit: the TNT that would really explode part of the cake. He and wife Zoë Foster-Blake had enlisted the help of the pyrotechnicians behind Sydney’s annual NYE fireworks, testing the explosives with a cupcake a few days prior.
And finally, it was time to make the dabbing Roblox guy, but not before a little hair transplant humour.
Lol.
Another lesson about perseverance in the face of adversity came at the 3.30am mark. “Is it perfect? No, you can see it, it’s not. Is working at a 1cm scale with icing and cake maybe a little too optimistic? Maybe it is. Is it my first time? No. Did I learn my lesson years ago? I think I did. But is it working, and are we going to keep going? Yes we fucking are.”
Truly, Hamish puts all our parents who battled with the Australian Women’s Weekly birthday cakes to shame.
Here’s the final product:
Another win for the big dog. I’m left with one simple question: how the hell does Hamish manage a kid’s birthday party after an all-night bender? Surely, it is not possible. Hamish, if you’re reading, we demand answers.
What is Hamish Blake’s cake night?
In case you aren’t across his baking skills, Hamish has actually been doing his viral “cake nights” for some time. Basically, he’s assigned — well, let’s just say creative briefs from his kids, and once he’s strategised how to execute them (the briefs, no the kids lol), he heads to the shops to pick up the ingredients.
He then spends the whole night baking, and for our pleasure, liveblogs the whole thing on Instagram.
His last few endeavors have been an absolute delight to witness, kind of like an Aussie homemade version of Nailed It.
Last time, he made a Lego cake which had to include Lego versions of his family eating a cake. Very meta.
Before that, it was a Rubik’s cube cake, which was required to be able to rotate like an actual Rubik’s cube.
Honestly, this was probably one of the most complex cakes I’ve ever seen.
The math involved… give this man his own baking TV show!
And of course, how could I forget the Avatar: The Last Airbender cake:
I completely trust in Hamish Blake’s powers. A Minecraft theme? Piece of cake.
