The invitations for Hudson's birthday were Disney "Cars" theme so the plan was to do a Lightning McQueen cake.
I had a few pictures and videos on the net as guidance and set about creating something that resembled the car character.
I make 3 slab cakes as the car needed to be quite long. I made 2 x butter cakes (pound cake) and another red velvet which I haven't tried before.
The slabs worked really well and provided a great starting point. I froze them for about a week, defrosting them the night before I needed to start decorating.
I layered the cakes (with red velvet in the middle) with red/pink buttercream flavoured with raspberry essence. I think I might have used a little too much as on its own it tasted a bit strong, but then with all the cake together and fondant it was okay.
The first steps were to carve out the cake and then apply buttercream all over it to keep it together. The carving wasn't too bad but the buttercream (crumb coat) was painful at the front where I had to build up the bonnet sides with extra cake. The buttercake kept coming off with the buttercream and in addition it kept mixing with the pink buttercream filling - not a great look.
The cake went into the fridge and I worked on colouring all the fondant and preparing as many other elements as possible.
I used pre-coloured red fondant to cover the whole cake. There was a rip at the front so I ended up adding some teeth and mouth area which in the end looked great. I added some intent details and then added the side window panels, the eyes and windscreen and the back window.
I was tossing up between two wheel sizes and probably went with the wrong one. The wheels were made using pre-coloured black fondant which I made into gum paste adding some CMC powder. This would ensure they were harder than normal fondant if left overnight. I scraped out some cake using the same circle cutter as I used for the wheels and folded the red fondant under.
I cut out some yellow 'flames' and painted orange gel paste onto the ends.
White and yellow fondant squares made the front and tail lights.
The bonnet disc was tan fondant with orange buttercream piped on with Hudson instead of Rusteze like the movie.
I made numbers using yellow fondant and then traced around them to create slightly bigger black numbers. These were stuck on each side and the roof. A spoiler was added using red fondant.
When all the details, minus wheels, were added to the cake I transferred it to the display cake board. At this time I ended up with some cracking on each side of the windscreen.
I decorated the display board with a black & white grid pattern and some brown sugar to look like dirt. The black and white fondant was rolled then and then cut in even squares before being attached to the board with some decorating jelly. I didn't measure out the squares against the board, just got lucky that it matched pretty much exactly.
The final steps of the cake was to add the wheels. I started by using a skewer through the cake but realised it wasn't necessary as the wheels were a tight fit.
Just prior to taking the cake to the birthday boy I brushed some olive oil onto the cake to create shine. This really make it's character come to life.
