The recipe I used for this cake was actually not a good choice.  It’s called a Kentucky Butter Cake and I found it in the website www.allrecipes.com

I have to admit I was impressed with all the positive feedback the recipe generated.  It’s just too sweet for our taste and if I ever do this cake again, some adjustments have to be made.  First of all, I will not leave the cake in the pan as long as I did.  It got stuck in the pan after I left it in the refrigerator for a day and took me a long time and a lot of hot water to get the cakes out.

So, instead of getting into the recipe, I’ll give you some tips for the assembly.

I started with two different sized pans to get as close to the shape of a car as possible.  The first pan was a  rectangular Wilton cake pan that’s about 10.5 x 6.5 inches and 2 inches deep.  The second pan was a 1.5 quart glass loaf dish.  It was not a perfect match since I had to trim about a third of the finished loaf cake to make it fit nicely over the first layer.

Since the cake was too sweet, I decided to just lay it on top of the first layer and didn’t bother with a filling.  The cake was dense enough that it didn’t budge once I had it sitting on the cookie sheet I lay it on.  This was a heavy cake so I had to put it on a stainless steel cookie sheet if I was going to be moving it around safely.

Then I cut a few tubular pieces of the cake trimmings to use on both sides of the hood.  I then had my prepared buttercream frosting divided into two unequal portions.  About half a cup was tinted black for the hood and the rest was tinted as close to apple green as possible.  I used the old Philippine brand Peotraco gel tint for the black and it worked very well.  The green tint was a combination of blue and yellow McCormick food color.  Just a few drops of blue and lots more of the yellow.

When I was satisfied with the colors, I started with the body.  The only way it was going to work for me was to pipe the icing and cover as much of the cake before I smoothen it all out.  I used a small spatula to smoothen it out but as the icing melted, I used my clean fingers and that’s why the photo shows a dimply-looking surface.  I tried to  contour around the roof and hood sides but this melted eventually so go easy on the contouring around the edges or use a Royal Icing recipe. Then I piped the black frosting on the hood and smoothened that out strictly with my fingers.

Then I took four choco cookies and cut out foil rounds that fit in the center of each cookie.  The foil pieces stayed on the cookies with a little dab of frosting.  Then on to the sides of the cake they went for the perfect tires. Spouse said the edges even resembled treads so that was a nice bonus.

I then cut out some pieces of regular aluminum foil for the windows,  windshields, license plate, front grill and tail lights and stuck it on easily.  There was a little add-on not every car will have – a padlock.  I wish I had gold colored foil but I didn’t so I just made a teeny-tiny padlock shape thing with the regular foil and it worked for. For a finishing touch, I put some red candy decor pieces for the turn lights, both back and front.  Voila!  There’s your car cake!

Now that I’ve written this all down, I think I’m up for another cake decorating job!