Want to know how to make a Minecraft cake? Of course, you do! A Minecraft cake is a great food source when you’re exploring the deserts, badlands, and jungles of your world, but it also has a few other unique uses. Speaking of jungles, that’s the Minecraft biome adorable pandas call home. Another fun fact about them is that cake is one of their favorite foods and an essential component of befriending them.
Since the Caves and Cliffs 1.17 update, you can even put a candle on top of a Minecraft cake, making the perfect birthday gift for your friends while playing one of the best PC games in multiplayer – or even just for your pet Minecraft horse or dog in your single-player world. As for its main use as a food source, a cake works in its distinctive way. Instead of simply munching on it – as a panda does – you can place it down, taking a slice at a time. This means you can make it last and save inventory space. Here’s what you need to know about the Minecraft cake recipe and the best way to celebrate birthdays in the sandbox game.
Minecraft cake recipe
The Minecraft cake recipe ingredients are:
- 3x buckets of milk
- 3x wheat
- 2x sugar (powder)
- 1x egg
You need to do quite a bit of work before you can make a cake, as it is one of the more complex food recipes in Minecraft. It helps to have a few arable and pastoral farms on the go, too, as you need wheat, sugar, cows, and chickens to make a Minecraft cake.
Once you have the ingredients for the Minecraft cake, you’ll need to use a crafting table to make it. As you can see in the image above, the correct order for the items is to place the three milk buckets in the top row, an egg in the center box with sugar on either side, and three wheat along the bottom.
How to make sugar
You can make sugar in its powdered form by harvesting sugar cane, which you can find in any overworld biome with water, as it grows in dirt or sand next to the water’s edge. You can also farm sugar cane simply by planting it on sand or dirt with an adjacent water block – you’ll notice you can’t plant it without the water. After some time, sugar cane grows upwards to a maximum of three blocks. Cut down the top two but leave the bottom one to carry on growing – before long, you’ll have more sugar cane than you know what to do with.
How to get milk
You need access to at least one cow to get the three buckets of milk required. You can use tamed cows lured with wheat and put them into a paddock or wild ones roaming the land, but they need to be an adult. Craft three buckets from three iron ingots each – you can’t skimp here as all three buckets need to go in the crafting grid simultaneously – and use the buckets on a cow by right-clicking with the empty bucket in your main hand.
How to farm eggs
Chickens lay eggs periodically, so your best method of collecting eggs is to have some chickens lured with seed into a coop, preferably one that’s large and comfortable. We want them to be comfortable. However, if you go exploring and see chickens out and about, an egg or two will likely find their way into your inventory.
Uses for a Minecraft cake
As we mentioned, there are a few unique uses for Minecraft cakes, but one we haven’t touched on is simply as a decorative item! Make the kitchen in your lovely base look even nicer by placing a cake on the side or dining table. That way, if you find yourself desperately hungry, you know there’s always something to eat when you get home. A cake slice isn’t a great food source, restoring just two hunger points. However, eating a whole cake is one of the best sources for saturation and hunger, with its seven slices totaling 14 hunger replenished.
Another way to present cakes as a culinary dish is a social one. Place a single candle on top of a cake and light it for a delightful birthday surprise! You can place any colored candle on a cake (top tip: red matches the cherries), but you can’t place more than one.
However, our absolute favorite use for cake is to appease pandas. If you drop a cake item near a panda in the jungle, one of many Minecraft biomes, it may hurry over and pick it up. However, pandas do not eat a cake block placed on the ground, so you should throw it with ‘Q’ rather than placing it by right-clicking. The cake does not cause a panda to enter love mode like bamboo, so this is more just for the cute factor.
Outside of being food for you and the cuddly pandas, you can also use it as a component for Redstone. Like hunger, a full cake emits a signal strength of 14, decreasing by two for every slice removed. If all else fails, and it is a bit wasteful, you can chuck a cake in a composter to increase its level by one.
So now you know how to make a Minecraft cake, go and enjoy your tea party surrounded by pandas – and don’t burn yourself on those candles. As this is a multiplayer game at heart, if this has given you all sorts of ideas for your friends’ birthdays, find out about hosting a Minecraft server, and invite everyone over for a celebration.