....so this is the other cake made for the same weekend party as the brobee cake for my other 4 year old....he was super into thomas the tank engine until about a month before the party and then he became obsessed with these lego hero factory guys....
...have i pointed out before how smart those lego people are...?....not only do they have my 6 year old hooked on all the regular lego sets (he scans the catalog for hours dreaming of the next set he *has* to have or just looking at the sets and directions over and over again)....but they have these hero factory dudes (which started as bionacles but i guess hero factory sounds much better and they can sell more that way)....AND they upgrade them....meaning they make the same guys...change their gear slightly....and call them the 2.0 upgrades....meaning my guys have to have all the same hero guys AGAIN....but they need the *upgrades*......and guess what's coming out this summer....3.0 upgrades....!...are you kidding me??....like i said smart marketing machines over at lego....i'm definitely in the wrong business.....but i totally digress.....
....all the trains are made from royal icing (although i use candy melt a ton, these images needed more finer detail than you can get with the candy melt)....but i used the same technique...took some of our coloring book pages and reduced the images to the size needed for the cake....and then prepped all the royal icing and tinted the colors needed for the trains and details....then traced the images onto parchment with the royal icing....you can get some awesome tutorials on royal icing and how to pipe, flood etc on other sites like at Bake at 350....so i'll spare you those details...but for me i did these way ahead of time and let them dry just covered in parchment for like a couple weeks before i needed them which really saved time when assembling the cake (especially since i did 2 cakes in one night)....oh and because i didn't pipe onto cookies or fondant and only on parchment...i made sure the images were thick and not too fragile once dry (so they could be picked up and handled relatively easy)....some of that was done by layering on the royal icing....(unfortunately i did not get pics of this process---yeah i know some kind of blogger i am right??)....anywhoo this process is pretty easy but it is a little time consuming, so open a bottle of wine and try it out....!
...the cake is made with a square pan with 3 layers (each cut in half) and everything crumb coated....i don't think i ever had to make grey icing on purpose before (has happened by accident on occasion!)....so for this particular shade...i mixed some black royal icing with white buttercream...but that turned it a nice shade of purple....so google said to just keep adding some of each of the primary colors until you get the grey color you want....and it totally worked!....
.....the tunnel detail is made with a combo of yogurt covered raisins and hershey's cookies 'n' creme drops (which btw are delectable even if they do look like small rocks..)...the background to the tunnel is just store bought chocolate fudge frosting...once that was on and still wet....i put the trains on and pushed them in slightly (just be careful not to push too hard to crack the image)....
.....and finished up with some green "grass" around the edges...and you have a thomas and friends with grey buttercream cake...!...oh and his fav is james so he's on top...and the other trains are thomas, percy, henry, and hiro....he originally wanted them all to be *cross* but unfortunately i couldn't find pics of them that way....(personally i think that would have been a much better cake since these trains are always *cross* in the stories...
.....and this was all the reaction i needed...!
.....i have a feeling this is it for the "little kid" type of cake requests....i think the almost 7 year old is leaning towards another star wars guy for his birthday this august...but i'm still trying to talk him into a pencil cake...!
....happy june to all and thanks for stopping by....!
