Percy Train Birthday Cake
My husband Michael, the engineer (aerospace, not trains), is the designer for all our sons’ birthday cakes. He’s a big fan of Duff Goldman and watches Ace of Cakes often trying to pick up any tips he can. We only tackle cakes like this three times a year and we are definitely not pros. I bake the cakes and whip up the frosting and he does all the assembly and decorative work. Here’s his story on how we made the Percy train birthday cake.
Monkey Boy’s favorite toy is trains so for about six months prior to his third birthday we heard all about how he wanted a Thomas the Tank Engine cake, then just a couples months before his birthday he changed his mind and asked for Percy, the green number 6 train. Green is his favorite color, so it wasn’t a big surprise.
Volcano Birthday Cake
For Top Gun’s fifth birthday, he requested a volcano birthday cake with dinosaurs. For some reason, he associates volcanoes with dinosaurs, so we obliged and made a chocolate volcano birthday cake with chocolate frosting and colored vanilla frosting with five toy dinosaurs—one for each year—strategically placed on top, making a sort of volcano diorama. He was so excited when he came home from school and found the cake sitting in the kitchen, though he felt we had not included enough dinosaurs in the diorama, so he ran upstairs and pulled another from his collection and plopped it down exactly where he thought it should go. Read more
Airplane Birthday Cake
In November we made a Lightening McQueen cake for Bob the Builder’s birthday, and at the time Top Gun repeated over and over how he wanted a Mater cake for his birthday. Well, two months ago he changed his tune after becoming obsessed with airplanes. “Mommy, Daddy, I want a crashed airplane cake. Mommy, you make the cake, and Daddy, you decorate it.” A crashed airplane? Huh? We pictured an airplane upside down in a pile of dirt and smashed parts or tail end up in a body of water, and that’s just a little too dark for a four-year-old’s birthday cake.
So even though Michael had been planning that Mater cake for three months (sometimes planning ahead can backfire), we switched gears and started thinking airplanes, not that Michael really minded since he’s an aerospace engineer and has an obsession with aircraft going back to his own childhood and seeing the Apollo 11 moon landing on television in 1969. Yes, the love of all things that fly is deeply rooted. Top Gun chose one of his airplanes to be the model, a Tonka Lil’ Chuck airplane, which is based on a GeeBee Model Z. Michael took that model and designed the shape of the cake but made the vertical tail, or the rudder, larger so it would have room for the birthday boy’s age.
Lightning McQueen Birthday Cake
We like to make our own birthday cakes, and this is the second time that we’ve tackled the Pixar’s Cars theme this year. The first time Michael made a model of the race track, but he wasn’t pleased with the results. This time he made a model of Lightning McQueen and he is much happier with how the cake turned out. Our boys liked the cake so much that the very next day our 3-year-old started asking Daddy to make Mater for his birthday cake. “Mommy, you make the cake, and Daddy, you decorate it!” he commanded in his sweet excited voice. He still asks every day even though his birthday isn’t until June!
This birthday celebration was for our oldest, who turned 5 in November. He requested a Lightning McQueen cake and wanted the flavor to be yellow. I’ve tried a lot of yellow butter cake recipes, but so many of them just don’t have a good texture or flavor. For this cake I tried the All-Purpose Buttery Yellow Cake recipe in my America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, and I have to say we were very pleased with it. The cake was built with three 9×13 layers, graham crackers, and chocolate covered donuts, then covered with red butter cream frosting and detailed with more butter cream and a few pieces of fondant. This was one large cake and it could easily serve 28 people or more depending on how you cut the pieces. For a smaller cake, you can use mini chocolate covered donuts and just two 9×13 layers. We used a Fisher-Price Shake ‘n Go™ Lightning McQueen as the model for the cake. Read more
Chocolate Birthday Cake
We’ve posted photos of some of the birthday cakes we make for our family, but we’ve never really mentioned what type of cake we make, so it’s high time we remedy that situation. Our favorite cake flavor is chocolate, and we’ve been using a recipe from Hershey’s for a sour cream chocolate cake that is moist and flavorful. The recipe makes about 6 cups of batter.
For this post, the boys and I made the cake in a new Bundt pan the shape of a castle, which I found at Chefs Catalog a few weeks ago when they had a free shipping promotion. The cake pan was on sale for about 1/3 the price of retail, so we decided to add it to our collection. The boys were very excited about making a castle cake and could barely keep their fingers out of the batter or the finished cake before I could catch a few photos (notice how some of the turrets are a bit mangled on top from little fingers pinching pieces).
The castle pan holds 10 cups of batter, and the risen cake went right to the top edge of the pan and spilled over a bit in the middle, so I recommend putting a piece of foil on the rack below the cake pan to catch any drips. I was very pleased at how nicely the details showed up on the finished cake, and a sprinkling of powdered sugar looked like snow on the castle. The boys loved it! Read more
Little Einsteins Rocket Birthday Cake
My husband’s family has a fun tradition for birthdays. His brothers make birthday cakes for their children, but they aren’t the average sheet cake with plastic decorations on top. The cakes are three dimensional creations and have included a flying Superman cake (yes, he really flew) and an R2D2 cake complete with a top that swiveled. So of course Michael wanted to join in the fun making cakes for our children.
When our first child turned one year old, Michael decided to start simple using an Elmo cake pan by Wilton. He learned how to make stars and how to use the different tools. For the second birthday, he made a Blue’s Clues cake using another Wilton pan. Read more
