Sunday 14 July 2013

I choo choo choose you!

Is it strange that when we (because surely I'm not the only one) think of drawing trains, we naturally lean towards the cartoon version? And when we're asked "what noise does a train make?" the answers tend to be "toot toot" or "chugga chugga" (or both); then we make motions with our arms, and pretend to pull on the cord that somehow makes the tooting sound?

If you have kids and watch Play School, then you'd certainly do that!

I was asked this week to make a train cake for a little boy's birthday. I wasn't sure where to start with this cake, but I knew it was going to be cartoon-style... So, I started with a cartoon setting: Blue sky, and green hills. I knew that I was going to make steam 'clouds' getting bigger and bigger, come out from the train (a lot easier to draw cartoon-style as well), so made those out of flower cutters, and then just with a knife for the biggest steam cloud:


With red, yellow, and orange fondant, I had the colours of the train ready. With a rectangle cookie cutter, I cut them out, and lined them up on the cake, on top of Cadbury Milk Chocolate Melts that I used for the train's wheels :)


Using left over fondant rectangles, the front driver's carriage and smoke stack were added, and the cake was looking so bright and colourful! I had an idea that the train could be coming out of a tunnel, so I added a black arch around the cake to represent this (which I'm not sure actually worked all that well)...



The final touches were painting birthday wishes into the 'steam' and adding some birds (yes, that's what they're meant to be) randomly into the 'sky'. After that, I glued some purple flowers in between the front of the train and the 'tunnel', just to fill in the big gap that was there.



And the train cake was finished!
(though it took a lot longer than it appears)

If I was to do this again, I would take out the tunnel, and add a couple more carriages to the train instead. I may even attempt to make a train track out of Kit Kats or licorice or something around the cake board... Nevertheless, I loved the brightness of this cake, as well as the cartoon style of it, and I really, really enjoyed making it and seeing it develop, even as the wee hours of the morning ticked on!

Happy birthday Slade! Toot tooooot!

No comments:

Post a Comment