Lightning McQueen Birthday Cake

I let Zach look through the catalogue of possible cake tins for hire and he chose Lightning McQueen.  This post documents my progress through reproducing the cake myself :)

I hired the tin from a shop in Birkenhead, but it's from Wilton and there are instructions on their website here.  I followed them most of the time, but did things a little differently in places.  Also, I think it could be possible to do without the tin if you don't have access to it, just by cutting out the right shape - maybe even print it off and cut it out as a template.

Here's the tin:

I made a chocolate cake which is pretty firm so would stay in shape when turned out, but still lovely and moist and very tasty, if you'd the recipe, just ask :) (Recipe from my friend Angie - her blog is here).

First stage was to coat the sides with thinned butter icing. Then put some on the areas I wanted to "stick on" the details I was doing in fondant icing.  I put the thinned butter icing on these areas as I came to doing each bit, so I could still see where all the details from the tin were.  I chose to do the details in fondant because I find it easier to work with and like it better than butter icing.

I rolled out the fondant and cut out the pieces as I needed them - I traced them from the tin.  Then laid them on top of the butter icing.

Then the lightning bolt and 95 in orange and yellow

Now most of the were done, so I did the crumb coating all over the rest using the thinned butter icing.  Then used a "writing icing" in black gel to draw the outlines of the details and fill in the tyre treads.  The wheel wells are red butter icing, smoothed over.

Then to fill in the red.  To make it red it is absolutely necessary to get a colouring gel/paste and if you leave it over night the colour will intensify too.  If you buy the liquid food colouring from the supermarket it just won't be concentrated enough and no matter how much you put in it will always look pink :) However, the red did not taste good with such a highly concentrated colour! Or you could get ready made red fondant and cut it in appropriate sections to lay it on like the rest of the details.

The website says to pipe the icing on in stars.  I choose not to do this for 3 main reasons - 1) my ability to pipe icing well is pretty limited! 2) the red tasted awful so I only wanted a thin layer and not big thick stars and 3) I wanted a nice smooth surface, like a car.

So I piped it on in really thin stripes - I actually didn't use a nozzle, I had some diposable piping bags and just cut a teeny bit of the end to leave a very small hole.  Then I could pipe it into the tricky corners.  Ones I'd filled in the areas with stripes I'd smooth over the top with a wet knife.

And finally I used a star nozzle to pipe plain butter icing around the sides just to cover them nicely because they still only had the thin crumb coating on.

And here's the final result:

I was pretty pleased with it and Zach was over the moon.  All three of my little monkeys loved watching me do it and see Lightning McQueen come out more and more :)