Lightning McCake

This year, the theme of Degen's birthday party will be 'Cars.' Almost as soon as I figure out a party theme, my thoughts turn towards cake design. Last year, I made a Thomas the Tank Engine cake that Degen just loved and so I thought that I could do the same thing with 'Cars' by making a cake that looked like Lightning McQueen. I took a look at the toy cars we had and thought that I could use the shape of loaf pan and with a few simple cuts make a reasonable likeness. I was beyond pleased with the shape of the cake with just 3 cuts. Then I just had to hope that the icing would goas well.

The three cuts that I made were for the hood ( __ ) , the windshield ( / )  and the back windshield ( \ ). I took a moment to really look at the shape of the loaf before deciding on how best to make the cuts.

I think that the 2 hardest colors to do for icing are black and red. It is hard to get the richness that you really want with both of those colors (black ends up being gray and red ends up being pink), and you often end up using so much coloring paste that the icing seems to take on the flavor of the dye. I was anticipating this going into the icing process, and had decided that since this was just our family cake I was going to let it slide. I did not have a lot of room for error because I had forgotten to get another bag of powdered sugar at the store, so I only had enough to make a half batch of frosting (thank goodness that this was such a small cake). Then as I was looking in a cupboard I spotted a bottle of red sprinkles and thought that would be the perfect thing to make m red richer and would even give it a shiny, metallic appearance.

Once I got the red icing on, I was loving how it looked. The icing looked great on the shape of the cake and the rough edges smoothed out making it look even more like the animated car. So...I did make one mistake with the icing that I am kicking myself for, and that is the windshield eyes. I used white icing and covered the entire windshield area not paying close enough attention to the fact that in the cartoon and on the toys, the color of the car extends down onto the windshield to creat an eyelid effect. Unfortunately, I had used up every last bit of my red icing just to cover the cake, so I did not have any left to make the change. (Moral: always make a little more icing than you think you will need.) Yes, I know that it was not a big deal, but the perfectionist in me was still totally bothered by the error in such a small (and easily remedied) detail of the decorating.

After all the base icing was on, all I needed to do was add the embellishments. I decided to keep this fairly simple because there were way too many, small design elements for me to try to replicate with icing (if I were using fondant, I could have done a lot more... maybe next year). I had some large, candy "sprinkles" in pastel colors and was able to find blue ones and just added an iris with black icing (this was easier than making blue icing and filling up a piping bag, especially for such a small detail). I added the mouth and the head- & taillights (using some m&ms), the back fender, lightning bolts, side windows and the tires (Oreo cookies). Instead of using McQueen's number, I put a 3 (for Degen's birthday) on the top and wrote his name on the hood instead of the Rust-eeze emblem to personalize the cake. McQueen does have some lines where the back windshield is that would have been easy to do, but I was worried that it would start to look too busy.

The only other thing that I wish that I could have done was add a filling to the cake. I gave it more than one thought, but decided it was too much of a risk with such a small cake. If I was making this cake for a crowd, I would probably put it on top of a layered round or rectangle and use my filling in those. But for our little family, this size was perfect with just about 10 pieces of cake.

Although there is some stress when I decorate cakes, I LOVE the challenge and the sense of accomplishment I feel when I am done! It means the world to me to see my kids' excitement over the cake that is meant just for them! I am already going over ideas and plans for Kyrie's birthday cake....thankful that I have a month and a half before I put it together!