Race Track Cake

"This was a really fun Race Track Cake for a third birthday!"

There are so many car cake designs and I wanted to make a special third birthday cake for my son. He loves cars, so I knew that I needed to make some type of car cake. 

Every day my son and I would go outside and play with his cars. We have car tracks through our vegetable garden, we had made semi permanent tracks throughout the grass, and we would also bring out different lengths of boards to make car ramps. We used different sized buckets and blocks, tree stumps are also fantastic for setting up the ramps. We have a tub of different cars. My son love all types of cars, tractors and trucks, but for this cake I figured that the party would be great to be centered around his race cars. 

My son’s favorites are Disney Cars, there is also an option of making a Lightning McQueen cake, but his cousin had this cake before. His other favorite is Roary, so that was also a viable option of the Roary the Racing Car cake. But really since we played daily with his cars I figured that he would love this unique cake.

I cut a small bit off one side of each of the cakes vertically so they would fit perfectly together. I also leveled the cakes so they would be exactly the same height. I have a cake leveler. I measure up the one side to the height that I desire, then I count up the other side to put the leveling band in the same notch. Then you just saw back and forth to get the same height for both cakes. Some people have a steady hand and can cut the cake horizontally but this is not my strong suit, so I use the simple tool.

I covered the cake with a layer of chocolate icing. I love using my angled cake spatula. I do have a straight spatula, but for some reason I find the angled spatula easier to use. 

I made a pattern of M&Ms around the outside of the cake and around the race track. When using the M&Ms I always try to put them in a dish and pull them out randomly. The tricky part is not eating too many while making the cake. 

For the road of the race track I used Oreo cookie crumbs. I used oreos and took out the middle part. Then I put them into a small kitchen blender. Once they were all ground up I  used a spoon to fill in the race track. 

I used vanilla icing for the grass and dyed it green using the Wilton Leaf Green. For the grass I used Wilton tip number 233. It is a large tip that makes multiple strands of grass at one time. Squeeze the icing close to the cake and then pull outward. This will make realistic grasses for around your race track.