Lightning McQueen Cake

I was asked to do a car-themed cake for a boy who absolutely loves Lightning McQueen. I challenged myself to do it in 3-D. I am thrilled with the results! Took about 5 hours to decorate the whole thing. I used parchment paper cut-outs to design numbers and lightning that would fit.

The red is all fondant. The other colors are fondant/gum paste mix and the white is buttercream icing. I covered it in buttercream first. This is what it looked like then:

I had the 3 inch toy car as my model. The cake was three 9x9" cakes that were trimmed and stacked in various ways. The final cake is about 7"x14"x2"high. When I was done, I wanted the wheels to look like they were buried in sand (since they were flat on the bottom) so I sprinkled brown sugar all around the cake. I'm super impressed with how this one turned out!

Smurf cake

Today's blog is just to show how I decorated the Smurf cake I made for my daughter's birthday. I used a shaped pan and filled it with my usual chocolate cake recipe for a 9x13" pan.

Then I covered the flat area with smooth white buttercream, and the rest, with stars. I used piping gel to make the black, and red fondant for the tongue. Pretty cute!

It was really easy to decorate this "shaped" cake! But it did use more icing than I expected. Stars take up more icing than smooth finish.