Car Birthday Cake

My son is obsessed with cars.  I guess this is typical of 2 year old boys, right?  (By obsessed, I mean for months it was his only word for things he wanted.  If he wanted his sippy cup, it was “car”.  Snack?  You guess it, “car.”   Thankfully he has started to really communicate in the past few weeks.  It just made sense that he have a car cake for his birthday this year.

To make your own car cake:

Get your cake mix ready.  I used a regular boxed cake mix.   Pour the batter into two loaf pans instead of a cake pan and bake.

Once the cooks have cooked and completely cooled off, freeze both cakes  for a couple hours to make it easier to cut and put icing on.

Once they are out of the freezer, put one  cake on a tray and take a small slice off the top half of it to make it flat enough to put the second layer on.

Then cut the other loaf cake in half, put a thin layer of icing on the bottom cake and sit half of the second loaf on top.

Use a can of regular white cake icing and keep a small portion white to use for the windows later.  With the rest of the icing use food coloring to make the car blue (or whatever color is desired).  I applied the blue icing on the main body of the car, leaving the window areas plain.  (You can leave places for side windows, but I opted to make it more simple.)

Use the remaining white icing to make a front and back window on the car.  It will look a little rough at first, but you can outline it with black decorating icing to make it look more finished.  Also put on 4 sandwich cookie “wheels”.

Now, what to do with the other half of that second loaf cake.

Of course you can just eat them as is, but I decided to cut it in half and make gas pumps.  There was a little white icing left, so I used food coloring to make it yellow, iced them, and wrote “GAS” on each of them with black decorating icing.  I also made a couple little gas pumps on the sides and put a couple orange flowers with decorating icing at the bottom.  I scrapped the filling out of 6 sandwich cookies and crushed them up to make an “asphalt” base for the car and gas pumps.  If I had known ahead of time I was doing gas pumps, I would have put the car on a bigger tray and put the pumps behind it, but they wound up on a separate plate.  Here is what the car cake looked like at the end of my baking adventure…

If you have a little one that loves cars, they will love this simple to make car cake! 

More birthday cake ideas your child will love:

• Tractor Cake and Cupcakes
• Shark Cake
• Dragon Cake
• Tea Pot Cake