I got to make the birthday cake, cupcakes and cookies for a l'il guy's Cars-themed 4th birthday celebration. For the cake, his mummy wanted to stay away from fondant, and requested that I do this buttercream design. I love the design cuz it still has the Cars colour scheme, glammed up with gold leaf.
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| Cars cake |
The cake is 3 layers of moist devil's food cake, filled with decadent whipped dark chocolate ganache. The outside is frosted with vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream. I added white food colouring to the frosting to get it a brighter white, cuz the butter we have here has quite a yellow tinge.
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| applying gold leaf onto buttercream |
To border the bottom of the cake, I added red buttercream using a small offset spatula. I like the texture that the spatula created.
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| almost done! |
This was my first time working with gold leaf, and I was surprised by how light it is! I literally had to hold my breath while applying it cuz it kept scrunching up on itself with the smallest gust of air! Luckily I had 3 sheets of gold leaf to work with, or I wouldn't have had enough to make it all around the cake! I used small tweezers to take a small portion off of the paper, and then stuck it onto the cold buttercream, applying it where the red buttercream met the white, kinda like for a geode cake.
The final touch for the cake was applying the dark chocolate drip, which is a 2:1 ratio of chocolate to cream by weight. You gotta find the optimum drip temperature, cuz too hot, and it'll melt the buttercream underneath and drip all the way down to the cake board. Too cold, and the drip will instantly solidly and not spread.
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| closer look at the gold leaf and chocolate drip |
My drip was at a good temperature while I was making the drips around the sides of the cake, but it had cooled down too much by the time I went to fill in the middle, as you can see from the rough texture on top. The cake would be topped with Cars toys and customized paper toppers from All Mommy Wants at the venue, which would cover most of the top anyway.
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| Cars drip cake, ready to go! |
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| mock-up of the cake using the toys I had on hand! |
The cupcakes were lemon cupcakes, frosted with lemon Swiss meringue buttercream. I'm glad I had yellow, red and black cupcake cases in stock to bake them up in!
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| Cars cupcakes |
I made the fondant toppers ahead of time, since they can be kept in an airtight container once they have dried completely. I used a black edible marker to draw the details on Lightning McQueen and for the Cars logo with the birthday boy's name on it.
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| lemon cupcakes with lemon frosting |
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| "Speed, I am speed. Vrrrrrrooom!" |
I also got to make this fun Cars-themed cookies set! Ka-Chow! I had to hand-cut Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater out of cookie dough cuz I didn't have a cookie cutter for them.
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| Cars cookies set |
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| Best Buddies: Mater & McQueen |
My favourite piece from this set is Tow Mater! Love his buck teeth and green eyes. I wish I had outlined McQueen in red royal icing instead of going with black, cuz he looks too intense with the black outline.
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| Tow Mater cookie |
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| Lightning McQueen Cookie |
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| Cars Cookies |
The birthday boy's mummy setup a simple dessert table at Aquarius Cove. Love the Cars-themed tablecloth, checkered flag plates and even the 3-tiered Cars-themed stand that she used to display the cookies in! She also arranged the customized paper toppers and Cars toys on the birthday cake herself. Love how it all turned out! Happy 4th Birthday, Caden!
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| Cars dessert table* |
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| Cars cake, cupcakes & cookies* |
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| Cookie platter* |
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| race to the finish!* |
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| Cars birthday cake* |
*
pics courtesy of the birthday boy's mummy
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