This months Bucket List item is a little bit of cheat. My delightful son turned 2 years old recently & he needed a birthday cake. And while I had tackled a few 3D carved cakes over the years with varying degrees of success, this one was going to be spectacular.
Firstly, major props to Ann from How to Cook That for her amazing YouTube tutorial & template. Without that template I can assure things would not have turned out nearly as well as it did.
It still took over 6 hours to make. That is a lot of time to spend in the kitchen on a cake that is only going to be eaten and destroyed, but the good thing about 3D cakes is there are a lot of cake scraps, so at least I had plenty of chocolate cake scraps to happily much away on while I was decorating.
I will say that I used Ann’s chocolate cake & buttercream recipe & while I was happy with the buttercream, the cake was a little too crumbly for my tastes & certainly made icing & carving Lightning more difficult than it needed to be. And I feel contributed to his overall slightly lumpy look as well. Next time I decide to tackle a 3D cake I feel I will be using my own chocolate cake recipe.
I do have to admit the cake itself tasted delicious & was still moist on the day of the party even though I had baked it 2 days before hand. And I certainly will be using the recipe again for a more traditional layer cake.
I won’t go into the details of the decorations as I feel that the linked YouTube video explains the process far better than I ever could & I followed it dutifully step by step. I will say that being able to make certain parts of the car weeks in advance was a godsend, though I wish I had of added a little Tylose powder to the fondant so help them harden. They were still a little soft 3 weeks later.
While I look at the photos & only see faults, I do have to admit that the Birthday Boy was besotted with the cake & is still talking about it 2 weeks later. So I’m going to mark Novembers Bucket List Bake a resounding success.
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