Last week was my first ever attempt at a 3d carved cake and I thought the results were pretty good. My friends son just turned two and honestly my very first thought was. "Oh my god, this is my chance to finally make a lightening McQueen carved cake", and so, of course I immediately volunteered myself to make his cake, knowing fully well there's no two year old boy in the country that wouldn't LOVE a lightening McQueen cake!
Now, I consider myself to be quite adept at cake making, having tackled my own wedding cake, three days before my wedding!!! Yes, I won't go into details but sufficed to say microwaving an undercooked cake 2 days before a wedding and then icing it in fondant and adding sugar roses was perhaps more stressful than designing the seating plan, and well, we ALL know how stressful those are.
Back to the lightening cake. I of course did my research and came cross several you tube videos which explained the process quite well. But of course, nothing will ever quite prepare you for doing it yourself.
The cake was made from a 9x13 inch cake and an 8x8, the bottom layer being vanilla cake with a raspberry cream cheese buttercream! Yum and the top layer a devils chocolate cake with a chocolate ganache. Double yum!
So, all was going fairly well. I baked the cakes, managed to get them out of the pan in one piece, thanks to good old fashioned buttering and flooring beforehand. Wrapped them in cling wrap and let them cool. Now, ideally these cakes should have cooled overnight, but I was just soooo darn eager to get carving I only allowed them to cool for 3 hours. Ummmm, yeah. That's where my mistakes started. I split them and filled them, liberally, with frosting and then rewrapped the cakes...chilling for an additional hour. FINALLY the fun started, by fun i mean my decent imto cake chaos. My second mistake was filling the 8x8 cake with ganache, I overlooked the fact that most of this layer gets carved away and frankly, carving sticky thick ganache is akin to creating a tower of soup!
After a great deal of patchwork I managed to carve a car shape and I will link to the blogger I used in order to carve the cake. Her instructions were pretty good and probably a lot better than I could rehash and honestly, she deserves the credit!
OK, so I chilled the cake overnight and dirty iced using a vanilla buttercream. Simple enough right...just so long as your buttercream is soft...next time, note to self, add milk!!! I bought a ready roll red fondant to cover the cake, again in my haste I didn't knead the fondant enough and it immediately cracked and then tore on the cake before I could smooth it over the cake. I had to remove it, pick off the frosting and knead again for at least five minutes. A cautery note. If using powdered sugar to roll and knead, take care not to use too much, a dried out fondant will not work on this cake, it has to be moist and very pliable to form and mould easily around the contours, corn starch actually works much better. So---Take two---I managed to successfully attach the rolled fondant, cut out holes for the wheels. I created the wheels using black/grey fondant, but the blogger advised covering cupcakes. I would have followed her instruction, except I honestly couldn't be bothered to bake four measly cupcakes for the wheels. Though I did feel guilty about this later when the kids fought over who should get the wheels only to see them try to chew through a hardened piece of fondant two inches thick. Funny though!
The eye piece was created in advance using fondant and left to dry to a hard state and the eyes were painted with blue gel food colour. The flames were also cut from fondant and painted with gel colouring to give a smooth yellow to red flame grading.
Finally I used a black royal icing to pick out the details. Black royal icing is a tool of the devil. Make sure you have a damp clean kitchen towel handy to wipe away drips from the cake. here's my main problem, for some reason the kitchen fairy had hidden my piping bag and tips...I literally searched high and low for them and I could not for the life of me find them...as it was at this point the night before the party and going on 10:00pm, I had no choice but to improvise. I had no parchment, so I had to make do with a zip lock bag. Filling the bag and snipping the tip. Whilst it did allow me to pipe, the line was much too thick and the bag was difficult to control. This was the most disappointing part of the cake for me as my piping work needs a lot of work anyway. But...well, after much cursing, shouting at my husband because I "hated this god damn cake" and repiping I finally finished the cake. Minus some luster dust and steaming the fondant to bring out the shine.
The verdict: I learned an awful lot making this cake, more than I've learned making any other cake. It certainly garnered rave reviews from the kids and parents alike and I was asked to make more lightening McQueen cakes for other moms of kids at the party, great for business. Bad for my mental health. No. It wasn't that bad. I'm pretty confident the next one would come out darn near perfect, but it was a LOT of work. Especially with a toddler running around grabbing lumps of fondant off my table and squishing it into my rug. Another thing to note is. This wasn't an inexpensive cake to make, the cost of the fondant alone totalled 45 dollars. I would definitely make my own marshmallow fondant in the future. Still a great experience and hope you liked this post about my cake adventure.
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