Kasserina: car

Sunday, October 20, 2013

1920s Vauxhall cake - October 2013

My first ever car cake. This is a cake copy of Rob's vintage racing Vauxhall. I couldn't have chosen a more tricky car to make as my first attempt at a car cake, but it's been a really good learning curve and it turned out pretty well.

First step, bake A LOT of cake!

It's always really hard to show the scale of a cake. Invariably my cakes are pretty big though. I put the mug in to show scale here but I still don't think you can see it very well.

I baked 4 sheet cakes for this, with 9 eggs in each (so that's a 36 egg cake, the average Victoria sponge has 4 eggs in). As with all sculpted cakes though, once I'd shaped it there was a lot of waste (which is currently in the freezer to make cake pops with later). The finished cake is big, around 20 inches long.

Stacked the cakes with real chocolate buttercream filling. Sculpted the basic shape of the car body. Put on several thin layers of buttercream (with extra melted chocolate added so it would cool to be fairly firm and help to support the structure of the cake).

Finessed the shaping of the body. Added modelling chocolate walls to the side of the car for extra strength.

Covered in fondant.

My new favourite is the Carma Massa Ticino Tropic fondant. It's really elastic, so doesn't dry and go scaly, but tastes better than many of them. As far as I know, you can only buy it from Town and Country Foods in the uk right now though, at £49 per 7kg with a minimum £80 order (but free next day delivery which is very handy).