Full Steam Ahead!

So in this post I've decided to include two cakes I've made. The reason being for this that I wanted to go right back to the beginning and blog about all the cakes I missed, and talk about what I liked, where I went wrong, etc. But the next cake that was on my list was a super easy cake, and in my personal opinion I couldn't have done it any better - even if I do say so myself! You may think I'm being big-headed, or you might look at it and think it's crap - but I really do try and find flaws with every cake I've made, and this one I couldn't. So I'm pleased with how it came out, and I'm proud of me. I'm allowed to be sometimes :)

This was a chocolate fudge cake that was ordered due to a recommendation from another client - apparantly her mother-in-law couldn't get enough of her cake (it was the purple butterfly cake from a previous post!) and decided to order this one for her friend who was leaving for a cruise. Simple - she wanted a pink heart cake, with her name on it, and a sugarpaste cruise ship. Which I delivered to the best of my ability and I love the simplicity of it! The ship was relatively easy to mould out of icing, and I added the blue and red detail on it using my sugarcraft gun and the pinhole disc. I really do love that thing. I placed it onto a bed of blue sprinkles for the sea, which I think gave it a really sparkly and girly touch. I finished the cake off with PME Clear Finishing Spray, which I recommend completely but you do have to use it sparingly as it can give a horrible yellow finish to pale-coloured cakes (thus ruining some of my future cakes :( ).

This was one of my favourite cakes I've created. It was for my adorable second cousin, Rhys, who is Thomas the Tank craaaaazy. To this day I have no idea how I managed to mould the actual train shape together using chuns of cake, but I think I did a pretty good job considering! Now I will tell you a secret though, I cheated. :O I actually bought a jam and vanilla buttercream roly-poly cake from Asda to get the tubey shape of his body. I know, I'm going to hell. It was in their basics range, too. :O again!

The rest of the vanilla cake I baked in a loaf tin, just like I did when I made my Fireman Sam cake. I then cut him down to size, took a bit from here and there and - voila! One TtTE cake at your disposal! I primarily covered him all in the lovely blue icing, then added in all the extra detail using a selection of tools like my sugarcraft gun (agaaaaiin), my ribbon cutter and just my general awesome hands. Haha. P.s, I've used the number '3' on the side of the cake as it was his 3rd birthday, not because I'm a complete retard and don't know that Thomas is actually engine number 1. Duuuh.

Icing on the Top:

• Using simple supermarket home-baking decorations like silver dragees and coloured sprinkles to add to the detail really tipped the whole design off.
• Every single section of the cake was edible, which is a huge thing considering how much detail is on there :)
• He just looks so happy.

Burnt Bits:

• The cheating part. Naughty Kirsten.
• He doesn't have any wheels. I don't know why. I think I realised this just as I was boxing him up, but just thought "eh, never mind, there's no track anywho."
• There's no track. I could have really gone to town on the overall finish by covering the cake board in icing and making up a track and all sorts. But I didn't, because I just couldn't be bothered.
• He isn't completely to scale, which is very noticeable. I didn't realise this until I was adding in the silver tubing around the edge of the train, when it starts off quite low on one side, but a lot higher on the other. My bad.

Again, I finished off this cake with the PME Clear Finishing Spray. I like to use it on cakes that have a lot of detail on it, as I make all the detail parts separately and then add them on right at the end. This means that I usually use a separate workspace doused in icing sugar to dry the pieces out, but of course the pieces also get covered in a fine layer of icing sugar - which ain't a good look. The finishing spray disolves the icing sugar, giving the cake the pristine look that I always love at the end of a good cake. But as mentioned, use it sparingly on lighter cakes, and if you do have to use a lot to get rid of any excess icing sugar then maybe think next time how you can eliminate as much of it before transferring it to the cake. I use a blusher brush for big pieces of detail (never used with blush, of course. It has only ever been used for cake purposes, I assure you!!) Also, another good tip is to cover as much of the surrounding surfaces and cake board as possible, preferably with kitchen roll. If the spray gets onto any surfaces like your table tops or turn-tables, it is a BITCH to wash off. It is almost like a permanent edible glue. Not nice. And if it gets onto your cake board, wipe it off immediately with a piece of damp kitchen roll. If you let it dry out and then try and wipe it off, you'll ruin the cake board.

At the end of the day, I created two pretty damn good cakes. Both recipients were extremely pleased (Rhys especially!) and I was very happy with them :) Go me!

Happy Baking x