Ferrari Formula 1 Race Car Birthday Cake

This is a great - and not actually that difficult - cake to make for anyone who likes race cars, Formula 1 and so on - whether that's your toddler nephew or your grandfather. I made this cake for my dad's 60th birthday as my sister and I were giving him a driving experience in various cars including a Ferrari around Thruxton racetrack so it seemed quite appropriate!

You can use any type of cake for this - it needs to be fairly robust so something like a dense chocolate cake or a madeira cake is good. Whatever you make, I recommend an 8 or 9 inch round cake.

If yours has risen like mine did, slice off some of the dome so the top is flat.

Slice the cake through the middle and fill, if desired.
Using a serrated knife, slice away the sides of the cake as shown, so you have a circle and then a long bit sticking out. You can draw a template on greaseproof paper and use that to cut around if you prefer. Keep the offcuts.

Add part of the offcuts to the end to lengthen the bonnet of the car and use another part cut at an angle to represent the driver's seat and the section behind it. It helps to look at pictures of Formula 1 cars, or if you have an expert in the house ask them - my fiancé was very helpful! Use buttercream to stick the sections of cake together.

Cover the whole cake with a thin layer of buttercream.

 

The next step is to cover the whole thing in fondant (roll-out icing). I used white, because I have a cake airbrushing kit and used that to spray the cake red, but if you don't have one then use red fondant. You can buy it in most supermarkets in the UK these days and don't need to go to a specialist cake shop.

 

Measure roughly how much fondant you need to go across the top and sides so you roll it out to the correct length and width, then cut off any excess. Smooth the fondant around the driver's seat.

Here's my cake airbrushing kit ready to go - it's very cool!

Always place your cake on newspaper or kitchen paper towels... it can get a bit messy!

I wanted to make the cake board look like the chequered flag and spent a little while thinking about the best way to do this. I decided the easiest thing was to completely cover a cake board in white fondant, and then cut out squares from some black fondant:

Use a little water or edible glue to attach each black square to the white board. You need to measure where each square goes - I did it by using a black square as a marker to show how much gap I needed to leave. Allow to dry.

I bought some edible icing printed pictures of the Ferrari badge - I wouldn't have the skill or the time to pipe or draw these by hand. They only cost a few pounds from Amazon.

I fixed them on with edible glue and used large balls of black fondant to make the tyres.

I made a flat, curved shape from black fondant which is the driver's seat; it looks more realistic when you see the whole cake.

There's also a wing section at the back that stands up and is used (I think) to make the car more aerodynamic. There is also one on the front but I had to get the cake into a carry case to take on the train and there was no room - it would have stuck off the edge of the cake board (as the car was at an angle on the board) and I wouldn't have been able to get the lid on. I did make the piece at the back, using cocktail sticks to secure it to the cake.

And here's the finished cake!

I'm sharing this with Formula 1 Foods, the blog challenge I have been running, in honour of the last Grand Prix race of the season.

 

Aston Martin supercar birthday cake

This year my boyfriend bought himself a new car which for obvious reasons is his pride and joy. So when it came to his birthday I thought he would appreciate the idea of a cake in honour of his car – and it would give me another opportunity to use my airbrush kit.

 

I’ve made a car cake before which was OK in terms of learning how to carve the cake; it ended up a bit messy as I wasn’t particularly good at covering cakes, and cutting out the shapes for the windscreen etc was a little awkward, but I liked the overall effect. This time I found an excellent tutorial online by Paul Delaney and tried to follow it but I didn’t have quite all the necessary tools or skills, or indeed time! Still, I am quite pleased with how this turned out.

 

My boyfriend loves chocolate cake and I knew the cake needed to be fairly dense to make it easy to carve, so I found this recipe on Lindy’s Cakes for a chocolate fudge cake and followed the instructions. I had a bit too much batter for the loaf tin so I used the rest to make some cupcakes.

 

 

 

I made the cake in a loaf tin this time – last time I used a round tin, and cut off the sides and placed them on top of the cake to make the body of the car. But my boyfriend has an Aston Martin which is a low, wide car, so I didn’t want to make it in the same way as last time. Instead I made the cake in a loaf tin and when it was cool, I carved the front and back to create the bonnet and boot and a slope up to the roof.

 

 

The car also flares out a bit at the headlights so I shaved a little off the sides of the cake so the outer corners were wider. You can see it starting to take shape here.

 

 

 

 

To cover the cake I made a simple chocolate ganache from plain chocolate and cream, waited until it had cooled and spread it over the car.

I put it in the fridge to set and then covered the cake with rolled-out white fondant. I used white because I was planning to airbrush the cake but if you don’t have an airbrush and don’t want a white car, obviously use coloured fondant at this stage.

 

I marked out the lines where the windows would go – because the car is black and the windows look black I wasn’t going to do them a different colour.

 

My airbrush kit is really easy to use – I’ve described how I used it before in this post about my carrot-shaped carrot cake. It allowed me to spray the whole car black leaving a fairly shiny coating; I was also able to build up the colour in areas where I wanted to make the windscreen look darker for instance.

 

I roughly followed the instructions in the tutorial for making the hub caps. I couldn’t make the wheels the same thickness as it was a relatively small cake – we got about ten slices out of it but I thought if I hollowed out enough space for four wheels there wouldn’t be much cake left! So rather than making the thick black tyre as the tutorial showed, I made it flat. I did make the hub cap element but struggled to cut the star shape neatly as I didn’t have a cutter the right size and it was quite fiddly.

 

 

I made the wheel from a mixture of fondant and flower paste, which I only had in white, so I then sprayed the parts that needed to be black with the airbrush. The silver parts were very small and I’m not sure how easy they would have been to airbrush; besides I didn’t have any silver paint for the airbrush. What I did have however was a little bottle of edible silver paint from a German company called Mein Cupcake, which also has the UK website Cake Mart which was very easy to use and just the right consistency – quite thick and shiny when applied. The only downside is that it doesn’t come with a brush in the bottle and you need to use a small paintbrush, but I guess the plus side is that you get more paint in the bottle that way!

 

I really liked the effect that I got on the hub cap and think that I will definitely be using this kind of edible paint for other projects. It cost £5 and is available from CakeMart, a brilliant website I discovered recently that has pretty much everything you could ever want for baking and cake decorating.

 

To finish the car I cut out triangles from the fondant/flower paste mix to make headlights, and painted these silver as well. I also bought an edible ink pen for a few pounds on Amazon and used that to carefully write in the number plate on a strip of fondant/flower paste; I did two for the front and back of the car. I applied the wheels and the other small parts with edible glue. I placed the cake on a board which I had covered with sugarpaste, and presented it to the birthday boy.

 

I was quite pleased with how this turned out even though it wasn’t anywhere near as good as the one in the online tutorial. The cake tasted really good too – even though it was dense enough to carve it was still really light and fluffy. I didn’t think I could split and fill it so relied on the chocolate ganache around the outside to give it the added flavour and texture and it did work really well.

 

 

Thanks to Cake Mart for sending me the metallic silver food paint to review, all opinions are my own.

Carrot Cake - shaped like a carrot and airbrushed

What's more appropriate for the Easter bunny than a carrot cake... and this one is shaped like a carrot!

I made this cake for my friend A's birthday in February; she is vegan and I've made her a few types of cake before but never a carrot cake. I also got an airbrushing kit for Christmas which I hadn't tried out and thought this would be a good opportunity. I remembered seeing a cake in a book once which I no longer have, that was shaped like a carrot and thought that was a great way to present a carrot cake!

The recipe is from the Vegan Society website which you can see by clicking the link. The cake seemed very dense, a bit like a fruit cake, but by the time we came to eat it a day later it was lovely and moist. It tasted delicious and for any vegan-sceptics first of all you wouldn't know from the taste that this cake was vegan - and secondly, vegan cakes taste delicious anyway!

Mixing the dry ingredients

Adding the wet ingredients

Ready to go in the oven - I used a loaf tin for the shape I needed

On a cooling rack - a little overdone on one edge but this didn't matter as I was going to cut that part off

I carved the cake roughly into the shape of a carrot

I covered it in a thin layer of vegan buttercream

And then covered it in white fondant, which is also vegan

This is the airbrush kit I got for Christmas, it's really cool!

Here's what you get inside the kit - a compressor, airbrush pen and a few colours. My boyfriend also bought me a separate box of edible colours.

The airbrush is quite easy to use at a basic level though I need more practice to get really good! You only need a couple of drops of colour and the airbrush is easy to control. You move it around in small circles to get an even coverage and can build up a darker colour by going over the same spot again, or by bringing the airbrush closer to the cake. The white fondant takes the colour really well and it doesn't take long to dry.

I covered a cake board in white fondant and sprayed that green, making some patches darker than others for a grass effect

I wanted to make the greenery to go on the end of the carrot, and tried a couple of things to attach it and eventually settled on a plastic dowel

I stuck it into a piece of fondant with part of the dowel sticking out, so I could push this into the end of the cake. I then used a knife to shape the end of the fondant to look like the carrot top

Here's the finished cake - what do you think?

 

I'm sharing this with the Love Cake challenge, hosted by Ness at JibberJabberUK, as the theme is spring.