Cars Cake Tutorial

A lot of people have sent me questions about the construction cake I posted a few months ago.  This weekend I made a similar cake so I figured I'd turn it into a mini tutorial which may help.  

DISCLAIMER!!!!  

I am not a cake decorator.  I'm just a mom who likes to try to make cool cakes for my kiddos and their friends.  My way may not be the RIGHT way but it's the way that works for me.  Hopefully you can take some of the ideas here and tweak them to work for you. 

You can totally make this cake!  It's pretty simple!

This is the tip I used...the "grass tip".

I taped several pieces of paper together and drew my number.  Then I cut it out to use as a guide.

I used regular copy paper with a free google image printed on it.  I have also used caution tape, wrapping paper, and decorative paper in the past.  I just taped it to the cake board.

Next I did a quick crumb coat in light green.  I would have made the green even darker but I ran out of food coloring and had to make another trip to the store.  If you use white to crumb coat, the white will show through your grass.  I recommend using green underneath.  I also didn't bother smoothing out my crumb coat this time, since it was going to be piped over.  

I placed my number 6 right on top of the crumb coat and traced around it with a toothpick.  That gave me a guide for making my road.

I used canned chocolate frosting to frost the road. 

I also crushed Oreos in my food processor and mixed melted butter with it to use as my road.  Then I began adding the Oreo road on top of the chocolate frosting.

I used a small spoon to scoop the road on and a small cake decorating spatula on the edges.  The spatula acted as a barrier as I used the spoon back to push the Oreos around and flatten it out.  Here is a close up of the Oreo/butter mixture.  It goes on fairly wet and hardens like a pie crust.   Plus it tastes really good too!

This is what the road looked like when it was finished.  

The next part was adding the grass.  I began on all four sides and filled in the top last. 

I like to point the grass in different directions so it looks more natural and not striped. 

If your hand is killing you from all of the piping you can add a little milk to thin your frosting a bit.  It goes pretty quickly if you have the right consistency.  I transported the cake like this and added the birthday boy's decor at his house.

Here is the finished product.  I added a banner, some flags and of course...CARS!

The birthday boy totally loved it!

If you wanted to turn this into a construction cake, you would just add chocolate frosting instead of grass.  And add construction vehicles and tire tracks too.  

Overall it's a really simple cake to make.  And the kids go nuts for it!  Hopefully this answers some of the questions and inspires you to make your own!