It was my brothers 30th birthday last week, and I was invited to his celebrations. This consisted of a bar crawl which started at 2pm.. I'm quite surprised I stayed alive to be honest! But I did and it was a lot of fun. Anyway, the reason I'm making a blog post about it is because it's the first time since I've been at uni that I've been home for someones birthday. And the first thing that entered my mind? Birthday cake!
Me and my boyfriend can't eat full cakes to ourselves (well, we probably could, but shouldn't:P) so I decided it was the perfect opportunity to try out my cake decorating skills. I've only made a couple of big cakes in the past, so I made myself a big task of doing a carved cake for the first time. This would be in the shape of an alfa romeo - my brothers favourite car. It was quite a big mission, but I was excited to try it!
Firstly, I watched quite a few youtube videos on how to make a car cake. I printed off pictures of the car so that it would fit on an A4 page - making sure to get an image of the front and the back as well as the whole car. I made the tires a week in advance, out of fondant icing.
I made two Madeira cakes in the shape of big loaves. I used the cake tin I mentioned in my previous post, where you can adjust the size of the tin. So I managed to fit both these massive cakes in one cake tin. This was also my first time making a Madeira cake, and I was impressed. I wish I had known of this cake when I made a giant cupcake - it has a great crust on the outside that's perfect for carving.
Before I forget to mention, I froze the cakes in foil before I carved them, just to make it a bit less crumbly. I then split both of the cakes in half, filled them with buttercream and stacked them. I cut out the image of the car and slowly cut the cake around it.
It does look easier than it is! Especially the shaping of the front - I did choose quite an awkward car that was very difficult to carve!
Here the cake is all carved and covered in buttercream. As you can see, it's in the shape of a car now, yay! The mistake I made here is I did a crumb coat, but the second coat of buttercream is far too thick. It covered up a lot of the carving we had done on the front of the car. I let the icing set for an hour or so, and then covered it in red fondant icing. I then added all the details onto the car. It took ages, but was worth it - it's definitely the best cake I've made to date!
Top tip - To give a shine to fondant, mix together equal parts of golden syrup to vodka and brush onto icing. It gives such a nice shine to cakes and I will be using it a lot in the future (and no, you can't taste it once it's dry:P).
The cake turned out better than I ever imagined, and I'm so happy I gave it a go. Now I can say I've attempted a carved cake - and succeeded!
Liddie x
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