Under Construction Cake and YW in Excellence

I am a leader in our Young Women's program in our church.  So I get to work with the youth and I LOVE IT!!!! 

A couple weeks ago we had a special evening for the girls and their parents--it is called Young Women's in Excellence.  It is a time to honor the girls and all the wonderful things that they are doing. 

This year we chose our theme to be:

"Under Construction"

Meaning that we are all here on earth under construction--trying to build ourselves and mould ourselves into the person that our Father in Heaven wants us to be.  And to become like Him.

While looking for things to decorate with--another leader found these awesome little construction trucks--and one of the girls painted them up.

Everyone decided that they would look SO GREAT on a cake.  So we started brainstorming about construction cakes.  One of the girls said "We should put a Temple built out of sugar cubes on the cake too!"  (A Temple is a special building of worship in the LDS Church and we just recently had one built near us in Vancouver, Canada--so everyone--including the girls, are SUPER excited to have one so near!  If you want to know more about Temples please visit THIS SITE)

So with those ideas I took the challenge to build a cake with the cars and a temple for our special night.

So here are a few pictures of the Temple construction:

Building Supplies:

Laying the corner stones on my cardboard foundation:

Building the walls:

Front of the Temple:

Laying another piece of cardboard on top of the walls to hold up the roof. 

Top View:

Front view:

With roof and spire on:

Its supposed to look like this:

Of course it isn't perfect--but I didn't think it turned out too bad for working with sugar cubes!

Here is the cake.  I made two cake mixes in my jelly roll pans and layered them with frosting in the middle.  Then covered the whole thing with green frosting and green coconut--to look like grass.  Then I put a dirt road in using crushed up Oreo cookies.

Then comes the heavy machinery--didn't she do a great job painting them?

And here is the finished temple site.

Digging dirt to complete the road:

Hauling stones for the temple:

Oh yeah--and I made the little cones out of orange dots:

So while I was making the cake--the other ladies were decorating the room.  And I only snapped a few pictures!  It was AWESOME!!!

Each girl got to where a hard hat in the value colors:

Our fearless leader:

Awesome signs:

The whole crew:

Some more yummy treats one of the girls made:

Some fun paint buckets of goodies that the girls got to take home:

And the cake right before we ate it:

It was a great night and one that I hope the girls remember for a long time.