Gloverly Cupcakes

Kids birthday cakes are one of my favourite cakes to make, especially when I get to come up with the design myself. As much as I love making pretty wedding cakes or cupcakes, there is something so fun about making bright, bold decorations for kids/novelty cakes – they are simple to make but always look so effective. So I was really pleased when Nadeem asked if I was able to make a transport themed birthday cake for his son Zahi’s second birthday. When I’m looking for inspiration, I usually turn to Pinterest. Nadeem’s only request was that he wanted a red bus, a digger and a train. I decided the best way to incorporate them all into one cake was to create a scene – a digger at some roadworks, a train on some tracks which went through the cake and then a bus on a road on top of the cake.

I made 3 cakes – a large chocolate cake, and a medium and small Victoria sponge. I coated them all with a thin layer of buttercream and left it to harden so that I could cover them in fondant. After covering the board completely in green fondant I covered the large and medium cake in green fondant too. I then covered the smallest cake with blue fondant. I added some hills to the bottom of the blue cake with left over green fondant (with a small dab of water). Finally I cut out some clouds from white fondant and stuck them to the blue cake too with (some sticking up over the top of the cake).

I used a long strip of grey fondant to make the road which I made run over the edge of cake and down onto the board – I wanted it to look like it was continuous. The train tracks were made from small rectangles of brown fondant spaced out in a curve on the board and then topped with two long thin strips of grey fondant to form the tracks.

I cut out two circles from black fondant and then cut the bottoms off so that they had a flat edge. I then stuck them onto the cake where the train tracks met it to create the tunnel. I rolled up lots of small (slightly different sized) pieces of grey fondant and squashed them. I stuck them around the edge of the black circles on the cake to create the edge of the tunnels. To make the vehicles I tried to each it simple and made each one out of lumps (cubes, cylinders etc) of coloured fondant icing, adding smaller bits for the detail – hopefully the pictures are self explanatory! I just copied pictures of toy diggers, trains and buses that I found online. The soil was just crumbled offcuts of the chocolate cake. I used the second tier on top of larger cake to create a sky backdrop. If I had to make the cake again to feed fewer people I’d scale it down rather than taking the second tier off – the extra height and the blue against the green definitely added something to the cake.