making it green

For our boy's 6th birthday party, he'd originally requested a locomotive cake. I do have a book on making kid cakes but it didn't have a locomotive cake that he was happy having, so I went over to youtube for some help. And while scrolling through several videos of train cakes (mostly Thomas the Tank Engine), up popped a tank cake on the side bar. Well, he was enchanted. "I want that", he said. And it looked easier than a locomotive cake, especially the way our boy was thinking it should be. And actually assembling the tank cake is easy. I'm here to tell you that the hardest part is getting the frosting the colour you want it, at least it was for me.

Now I took the easy way out with the cakes. As a couple of the crowd have wheat issues, I went with Glutino's Gluten Free Chocolate Cake mix - 3 of them. I whipped them up and baked 2 cakes, 1 in a 9x13 pan and 1 in an 8x8 pan. In retrospect I could have made the tank using just the 9x13 cake, making it a bit smaller.

Once baked, I cut a round out of the large cake and evened off the edge. I placed this cake on a foil covered stiff cardboard I used for the cake board. I trimmed the 8x8 cake and placed it on top of the larger rectangle and the round cut out went on the top.

 To glue everything together, I used a crumb coat of frosting. I made the crumb coat using food colouring in liquid drops and even using all the green I had, I still only got a bright shamrock green. I set up the layers and covered the cake with this frosting and put it in the fridge to set up.

And then went off to the craft store for gel food colouring - in Moss Green. I had to use quite a bit of gel to get the olive green colour I was going for, but it worked! I frosted the entire cake in the olive green frosting, then added a chocolate roll wafer cookie for the gun, and used chocolate buttons (large) for the wheel rollers with a bit of black frosting gel to outline for the treads.

 Add candles and lego people and the cake was ready for the party. It was a hit and fed a lot of kids and adults.