FIRE ENGINE CAKE

Well it's been a while since my last post and the reason for this is I've been so busy with the Little Man's birthday cake. He'd requested a fire engine cake and having never made a cake using sugarpaste before I had a lot of research to do. I learnt a lot along the way and it was well worth it in the end.
I chose to use a maderia cake as it's quite a dense sponge which can support the stacking of the loaves and the decoration ontop. It also tastes better after a day or two which meant I could get ahead by baking the loaves on the Thursday.
After the loaves had cooled I levelled them off and cut one loaf and stacked these pieces end on to make the cab of the engine.
Later that night the next stage was to crumb coat the cake, which sounded very complicated but just meant covering it in buttercream. I used a red paste to colour the cream rather than a liquid food colouring and a small amount of this gave the right shade of red. I have to say that I would have been lost without my new pallet knife at this point!
The day after I rolled out the icing (I cheated a little here and had bought pre coloured red icing) and after the third attempt managed to cover the cake and smooth down the sides.
Then came the best bit!! I was really good fun to add all the little bits of detail on the cake and I mixed up lots of different colours using food colouring and white icing to make the lights, hose, water etc.
The real test came on the Saturday and I'm pleased to say that my son loved his cake, he wouldn't let us cut it until the next day as he wanted to look at it. But after he found ot you could eat the oreo cookie wheels the cake was devoured!