Boy Birthday Cake

Today I am sharing how I made this awesome boy birthday cake. Well, I thought I was going to get off easy this year. What kind of cake would my soon to be 5 year old want? I was thinking a rectangle cake with dinosaurs or sharks on top...maybe one of the shape wilton pans I already own? I was WRONG!! I was immediately told he wants a combine cake that stands up. Okay, do you know what a combine harvester is?

Well, you get the idea. So my mind went to work...how was I going to pull this off? I am not a shaped cake maker. I have NO experience, and I really had no idea how to go about this. My main goal was to just make it look like a combine, as long as it sorta, kinda resembled one I figured I would be good. Just had to win the approval of my birthday boy. First off...the base, I decided to buy a wilton 8x8 cake plate with removable 3" grecian pillars (yep, like for wedding cakes). I made several 8x8 chocolate cakes and stacked them on the plate with layers of white buttercream to even each layer. I had to cut a piece of cake for the top. (fyi, I did use the pillars at the end to hold it up and just covered them with the wheels so it actually looked like a standing combine.)

Then added more frosting to have a complete coating of white frosting. At this point, my dh said "uh, this is supposed to turn into a combine?" Oh what little faith! Next I decided to frost this entire base red since that is the color my little boy wanted. We don't really love the taste of fondant so instead of pretty lines and yucky frosting we went with uneven lines and yummy buttercream as our base! So I found my red dye and went to town.

Let's just say there is no way this frosting was going red. So this was my result. Pink Frosting.

Yeah, thats not going to work! I used the whole bottle and it just turned it this dark pink and it tasted nasty. So into the sink it went and then ds and I headed back to the store for more powdered sugar to start the process again. I had green tint so we decided on green for the second go around. I also made some rice krispie treats to make the shapes I needed.

At this point, I kept working and forgot to take more pictures so I'll just give you the verbal rundown. I used black fondant (which I was scared of but was SOOOO easy!) to cover the wheels and to make the roller. I made a cab of rice krispies and frosted it gray to imitate the glass cab on the front of the combine. I used the box from my wax paper and cut it down to 'hold' my grain head on the front of the combine. (I covered it in black fondant as well.) I used skewers and toothpics to hold the rice krispie treats to the cake (which worked awesome). Then I added a few frosting touches like yellow to the wheel rims and some icons on the combine (inlcuding a john deere logo!). The only complaint I got from my little boy is I put the engine pieces where the grain goes...oops! Anyways, here is the final product. The cake was a big hit, and after hours and hours of work...I was just glad that it came together!

One sad thing about this birthday, is that over the course of the day it became evident that my little boy was becoming sick, so he spent dinner laying on a chair and didn't even get to eat any cake! That was monday and he still hasn't had any of his cake, poor kid!

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