Monsoon Mama: Train Cake!

I made a train cake for Chickie's 5th birthday party yesterday. Initially, I had planned on making a huge sheet cake (layered) for everyone and then topping it with a train cake, but about a week ago, it looked like 60 people were going to come to this party, and I had a flash of sanity and realized that I should just order a big sheet cake and make a train topper for it. Thank you, Sugar Bakery! They make delicious cakes and cupcakes that are reasonably priced and aren't cloyingly sweet. IMHO, I highly prefer Sugar to Party Favors... remember the amazing construction site cake from Chickie's second birthday? Yeah, it was from Sugar.

But anyway-- the train cake! Here's how we did it...

I got an idea from a video I found on YouTube, and I had a team of experts (Dan and Adina, our amazing babysitter, who decorates cakes all the time), and we had a lot of fun!

I started by making one chocolate cake and one yellow cake in 9x5x3 loaf pans. Here's the recipe I used:

http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/recipe-collections-favorites/desserts/delicious-cake-00000000056583/index.html

It's an excellent and easy recipe. I've made these cakes many times, and they never fail! Loaf cakes take a long time to bake though-- an hour or even a little more.

Then, I trimmed off the top and sides of the loaves so that they were perfect rectangles. I picked the chocolate loaf for the engine and the yellow one for the freight cars. Chickie had specifically asked for a red engine-- basically, a replica of Thomas but in red (his favorite color) instead of blue. I had primed him for the fact that the cake would NOT be an exact replica (he had been telling me very specific details about the colors of Thomas's lines and detailing), and he finally said, "Well, Mommy, you don't HAVE to make a Sodor engine..." I was like, "Oh, OK! That's great news! I'm so glad you can be flexible about this." Yes, the child needs a lot of positive reinforcement about flexibility. So does his mom :)

To make the freight cars, I cut the yellow loaf into quarters:

Dan started working on the engine. He cut the loaf to be slightly larger in width as the freight cars, cut a piece cross-wise off the back of the top, and glued it back on the remaining piece with frosting:

I made a TON of buttercream. I have to say, it didn't taste all that good because it was ridiculously sweet, like, rot-your-teeth sweet, but really, we figured that this whole train was going to be a decoration and not for mass consumption (um, we were totally wrong-- which child in their right mind wouldn't want to eat a cake shaped like a train and covered with colored frosting and candy?? Right, ZERO) so we went with it. Adina was our master frosting color-er, and she got started making red frosting for the engine:

Ever the creator and engineer, Dan got pretty elaborate with his engine construction, and he ended up cutting little pieces of this and that and shaving everything down just so:

I will add that while the engine looked really fantastic, it was a bear to frost because it was really crumb-y from all that cutting and shaving. So, sadly, some of the detail was lost during the frosting process, but what can you do. Yes, this was a cake for a 5 year old, but our 5 year old is really.freaking.particular about his trains. That particular-ness is subject for another blog post.

So, by this point, the kitchen table was covered with bowls of colored frosting and little containers of all sorts of candy that I had picked out to decorate the freight cars:

After frosting the cars, we took the Sugar cake out of the fridge, only to realize that the cars and engine were actually too big for the cake! Time for a little surgery:

We were geeky enough (well, Dan was geeky enough... what can I say, the man is an engineer...) to make a template to make sure everything would fit:

And the assembly began!

I made a batch of chocolate buttercream to pipe as the track and details for the engine and cars. I used the same recipe as the vanilla buttercream, but I added 3 squares of melted unsweetened Baker's chocolate. Remember how that buttercream was so insanely sweet? Unsweetened chocolate took care of that problem, and it ended up being very, very good. Yes, we had to taste it many time to make sure it was just right... Right. Adina piped it along the edges of the tops of the cars, and we filled each one with freight! Lots of fun with candy.

We added wheels and somehow managed to transfer that big engine onto the cake! For the engine's face, we actually just smeared on (MUCH easier said than done, let me tell you!) a bit of the leftover buttercream and used mini chocolate chips for the eyes and smile.