The Train Cake

For the September birthdays in my family, we had a joint birthday party.  There are 4 of us with birthdays that month, so it just makes sense to do one big party.  I got to make the cake.  Or cakes, in this case.  Since three of the birthdays are kids, I decided to do a fun kiddie cake.

Here's a few pictures of the finished product.

They were pretty straightforward, and I didn't take any pictures during the process.  I started out with 7 chocolate cakes (using my favourite recipe) baked in a mini-loaf pan, and one baked in mini muffin pan.  The loaf pan has 8 loaves, the mini muffin pan makes a dozen and the recipe filled more than the two pans - I used a regular muffin pan to use up the extra.

To make the engine, I cut one of the loaf cakes to sort of notch onto the back of another standing upright. then I added the mini cupcake for the smoke stack, gluing it all together with chocolate buttercream. Now that  I'm trying to describe it, I wish I'd taken a picture before decorating it.

I used tinted buttercream icing for pretty much all the decorating, except the black - I used chocolate buttercream and added some black colour, and the wheels - they are candies I found at the grocery store.

It was probably the most challenging cake I've done so far, since all the pieces were so small they didn't stay put very well as I iced.  I knocked the engine over a couple of times as I was piping on all the little stars.  Probably not a project I'll do again for a long time, but the end product turned out alright.