The Minecraft cake recipe is much-needed if you want to make a cake for feeding yourself, to use as a decorative item, or even to please a panda

Want to know how to make a cake in Minecraft? Of course you do! A Minecraft cake is a great source of food when you’re exploring the deserts, badlands, and jungles of your world, but has a few other unique uses too. Speaking of jungles, that’s the Minecraft biome adorable pandas call home, and another fun fact about them is that cake is one of their favourite foods and therefore an essential component to 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 in multiplayer… or maybe just for your pet horse in your singleplayer world. As for its main use as a food source, a cake works in its own distinctive way. Instead of simply munching on it – like a panda does – you instead place it down, taking a slice at a time. This means you can make it last, and save inventory space while you’re at it. Here’s what you need to know about the cake recipe and how to make a cake in Minecraft.

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.

The recipe for a cake in Minecraft is three buckets of milk (so you also need nine iron ingots for buckets), one egg, two sugar and three wheat, and you use the full 3×3 grid of a Crafting Table, so you need one of those, too. The correct order for the items, as you can see in the image above, is to place the three milk buckets in the top row, an egg in the centre box with a sugar on either side, and three wheat along the bottom.

Sugar, in its powder form, is crafted from sugar cane. Sugar cane can be obtained from any overworld biome in which there is water, as it generates on dirt or sand next to the water’s edge. To farm sugar cane, simply plant 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.

To get the three buckets of milk required, you need access to at least one cow. It can either be tamed or wild, but it does need to be an adult. Simply craft three buckets from three iron ingots each – you can’t skimp here as all three buckets need to go in the crafting grid at the same time – and use the buckets on a cow by right-clicking with the empty bucket in your main hand.

Minecraft chickens lay eggs periodically, so your best method of collecting eggs is to have some chickens in a pen (preferably a large, comfortable one, of course). However, if you go exploring and see chickens out and about, chances are an egg or two will find their way into your inventory.

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.

Other uses for a Minecraft cake:

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. If this has given you all sorts of ideas for your friends’ birthdays, find out how to host a Minecraft server, and invite everyone over for a celebration.

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Please don't ask Danielle what her favourite PC games or genres are, she'll never give the same answer. Currently, you'll find her playing Minecraft, Fortnite, and Dead by Daylight - not necessarily all at the same time.