Train Cake

One of our favourite rituals is to look through the Woman's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book for birthday cake inspiration. I have two of them, the vintage and the modern. I love looking at how fashion has changed over time. The buttercream icing, natural colours and terrible photography has given way to pretty fondant icing, beautifully worked, and photographed on attractive backgrounds. The Vintage gets my vote, every time. They feature cakes that I have an outside shot at actually achieving, and being an under-achiever, I feel comforted by that.  With a train cake in each book, it was only a matter of time before a train cake was commissioned. I am only surprised that it took 10 years.

I fell back on my trusty formula of buying slab cakes, covering them in egg white icing and smothering them in sweets. Once a cake is covered with sweets, no-one looks at anything else.

Cake Bases

The engine is made up of two madeira cakes and one swiss roll. One madeira cake is sliced lengthwise as the base of the tank. The swiss roll goes on top of that. The second madeira cake is sliced in half widthwise. Cut sides go face down on the board to be the base of the driver's carriage. The first cake is then laid on top of that an trimmed down to be the roof of the driver's carriage.

The two carriages are just single slab cakes. Lemon drizzle, in this case. The funnel is a section of Cadbury Mini Roll and the wheels are Oreos.

Icing

I spent literally one and a half hours mixing up the red icing. One and a half hours! For just the engine! I read bloggers who say, "I whipped up these cookies in about an hour." The ones that are each decorated with piped icing, in 5 different colours, all piped and flooded and decorated in 5 different patterns. How? I can't even mix the icing in less than an hour, let alone mix batter, cut out cookies, bake cookies, make outline icing in 5 different colours, make filler icing in 5 different colours fill piping bags and pipe the 5 different designs. That's about 25 hours of work for me. But, back to the horrible red icing. There reason I say horrible is because of the quantity of food colouring in it. The base is egg white icing. I had paste colour called Scarlet, but was a pinkish red. Even with the entire jar of paste in there (gross), it was still only pink. So I had a rummage through my cupboards and turned up another bottle of food colouring in red. Expiry 2008.  A few drops made no difference so in went the whole bottle. (Eeew!) I decided I'd better not let the kids eat the red icing. But it was still pink. I found another bottle of red, from colouring easter eggs in about 2009. Use by 2010. (No problem!) 

Actually, there was a huge problem with putting so much colour in the icing. It went very runny. I've had this happen before, and it is the reason that I have switched to only buying paste colour. I could not get the red to set. The next day, I iced the cake and you could see every contour of the cakes underneath. I mixed up the rest of my egg white powder and put that in. Back to a pink shade. A few drops of yellow took the bubblegum sheen off the pink, but it was still pink. The texture was improved and at least I could get the cake covered. I spent the next few hours scraping icing off the board as it poured off the cake. I didn't dare decorate it yet.

Instead, I did the two carriages. They are fondant icing that my supermarket was selling pre-coloured. Hooray! I just rolled it out and laid it over the top of the two cakes. I was smarter with the green one, to tuck in the bottom so the raw edges weren't on show. I covered up the blue one with twists of red liquorice. 

Decorating

The red liquorice was used on the blue carriage to hold the smarties in place. The chocolate biscuits on the green one are just laid in place. Luckily, I had set aside some white icing which I used to stick the smarties on to the wheels. Otherwise we would never have got to the party!