This cool collection of train cake ideas and designs is sure to provide you with inspiration as you set off to create the coolest train cake ever. Enjoy and good luck!
4th Birthday Train Cake
Submitted by Emily S.
My son loves trains and wanted a train party for his 4th. So, I made simple chocolate cupcake toppers shaped like trains for the guests, but made THIS guy for the birthday boy.
This 4th Train Birthday Cake Idea was my first attempt with fondant and homemade buttercream.
Easy Homemade Train Cake
Submitted by Melissa
My 6 year old LOVES trains. It was fitting that he have a train cake for his birthday. I used buttercream to cover this cake instead of fondant. For the wheels I used mini Oreos, the steam spout was a mini ice cream cone rolled in sprinkles and filled with white buttercream frosting. It was a hit with the little ones!
Choo-Choo Train Birthday Cake
I have always had an interest in cake decorating and becoming a mom gave me a real excuse to try my hand at it. This was the first specialty cake I ever attempted and I was so pleased with the outcome that I was hooked!
I made this cake for my son’s second birthday. I can’t take credit for the design – it’s from the Betty Crocker website, which has an instructional video and step-by-step instructions. The cake itself is made from two standard-sized pound cakes. You use one cake to make the engine and the second cake cut in 4 pieces for the cars. I baked a chocolate pound cake for the engine and plain pound cake for the cars in order to have some variety.
Help by the Betty Crocker Instructional Video
I can’t say enough positive things about the Betty Crocker instructional video. When I attempted this cake I was a complete novice and they went through every step including the basics of “crumb coating,” which really helped!
My son loved the cake! I just have one word of caution. All of the cookie decorations quickly got soft from being exposed to the moisture of the icing. I used mini Oreos and mini Nutter Butters for the wheels; I also placed animal crackers on one of the cars and crushed up Oreos on another car to look like coal. All of these decorations degraded to a soft, bread-like texture after being on the cake for just a few hours. However, the cake was so cute that having a few un-crunchy decorations was a small price to pay! The pretzel “logs ” stayed crunchy!
Coolest Ever Train Cake – So At-TRACK-tive!
Submitted by Lyn I.
I was commissioned to make a cake for a 6 year old boy who loves train tracks and real trains. His mother sent me some of the child’s traffic lights drawings as an idea. I did my research, brainstormed on the design. Every night I worked on making the toppers. Since the party was on a Saturday, I took a day off to bake stack and carve the cake. I took another day off from work to put together everything and worked till midnight. It was done on time. The boy and the parents were in awe and everyone at the party. It was my latest creative creation and made everyone happy. The parents couldn’t thank me enough. I felt really accomplished.
Birthday Express Train Cake
Submitted by Soumya L.
Making this birthday express cake for my 3 year old son was an enjoyable experience for not only me, but also for my husband and son. Arush was so excited that he used to wake up in the middle of the night and ask me when shall I make his birthday express?
For the base, I used a silver color plastified sheet( so that I could clean easily the extra butter cream) wrapped on a cardboard. I used Kit Kat and black licorice for the railway tracks. Sprinkled some ground Marie biscuits for the sand in between the tracks. To mention specially, my son helped me ground the biscuits.
I baked two rectangular cakes and cut out one engine and 4 wagons. For the round part of the engine I used Swiss rolls and connected some colored popcorn with pipe cleaner to show smoke coming out of the chimney. I used Oreo biscuits for the wheels and red licorice to connect the wagons.
Decorating the Cake
I used colored butter cream to decorate the engine and the wagons. Yellow candies for the lights and colored candies for stones on the grass and green butter cream and green colored scrapped coconut for the grass. I used wafer roll biscuits to keep logs on the third wagon and M & M on the last wagon and chocolate sticks for the bars of the animal cage, with a wafer biscuit rolled in chocolate ganache as lid of the cage.
The railway signs were easily available on the internet. Overall……making this cake was overwhelming for me and also for my son. All my hard work was paid for when I saw the happiness in his eyes and his smile seeing the cake ready.
Thanks to all the lovely cakes on this web. I surely got some good ideas. Being a beginner making this cake has motivated me to try more.
Train Cake for a 2-Year Old Boy
Submitted by Siobhan F.
I baked a delicious and easy chocolate cake for this train cake and let it cool. I turned it out onto a cake board I made from a baking tray and silver paper. Then I made green vanilla butter cream and spread it onto the cake with a spatula and created a grassy effect with a serrated knife. I made the train tracks out of red licorice and chocolate finger biscuits and placed the birthday boy’s favorite train on top!
The trees were made from ice cream cones coated in white chocolate which I had melted in the microwave and colored with green food coloring. I rolled the cones in the green chocolate and dipped the bottom in choc sprinkles to represent bark and break up the green cone on the green cake. Then let the green chocolate cones set a little so I could add the fruit sherbet lollies on it without them sliding off and let everything set in the fridge. I placed the cones on the cake by pressing them gently into the icing.
Then I got some candy toad stools from the supermarket and put a toothpick into the stalk to support them and pierced it into the cake. This was for my 2 year old nephew’s birthday!
Train Cake for Daughter’s 5th Birthday
Submitted by Aditi B.
This Train Cake is for Rishika’s 5th birthday party on 2nd Jan 2011 in Mumbai, India.
I made 6 cakes – 6 inches X 3 inches loaves (I have used normal sponge cake) – trim the edges of 5 cakes to make suitable sized train wagons and an engine (cylindrical shaped with a 2 cm rectangular piece at the bottom). From the 6th cake cut the guard wagon cabin, engine cabin, steam snout, coal wagon and signal base.
Assemble each wagon and glue it together with colored icing of your choice. Cut 1 cm thin strips of wafer biscuits to make the top edge of each wagon and fill them with goodies – butterscotch balls, peppermint cigarettes, choco chips, choco vermicelli or anything else your child likes. Use similar strips to make balcony railings of the guard van.
I have put aluminium foil and a baking paper on top of a wooden sheet and used it as a base. Make train tracks by putting ice cream sticks on to the prepared board. Assemble each wagon on the tracks and fix them together with small pieces of wafer biscuits. Make wheels from chocolate coins/suitable sized biscuits. Make a face with a choco biscuit and fix eyes (white gems+choco chip), mouth – pink gem cut in half. Use a drop of margarine/icing to fix these onto the face.
Thread some popcorn on a bent toothpick/any stiff string and fix it in on the top of the train snout to make it look like puffs of smoke/steam. Fill the coal wagon with choco chips to make them look like coal pieces. Grind the cake leftovers in a mixie in with edible colors (green and blue) to get colored cake crumble..decorate the surroundings to look like green lawn and blue lake. Fix some paper trees.
Attach a signal – stick some gems on to an ice cream stick with some icing and fix it onto the signal base. Place it at a suitable place on the green lawn near the tracks.
Easy to Make Train Birthday Cake
This train birthday cake I made for my son’s 3rd birthday. I used a big loaf pan and 2 smaller ones which worked out to be the same volume as 2 regular cake pans.
I made 3 batches of cake, ending up with 3 big loaves and 6 small ones. For the engine, I used a big loaf on the bottom, topped with 1/3 of a big loaf for the cab and 2/3 of a small loaf trimmed to make a cylinder for the boiler.
The coal car is 1/3 of a big loaf hollowed out in the middle. The passenger car (blue) is 2 small loaves stacked on top of each other. The flatbed car is a small loaf hollowed out in the middle. The caboose is 1/2 a small loaf with another piece on top trimmed to have a roof with a slight overhang.
The brown car has chocolate buttercream frosting, but for the rest I used gel paste food coloring, which I just discovered and love. I also learned how to smooth buttercream frosting: a couple minutes after spreading the frosting will crust, then you use a paper towel and smooth it with the warmth of you hand, then carefully peel off the paper towel. (Maybe everyone already knows this!)
The engine wheels are licorice in the front and full Oreos in the back. The other cars have single Oreo wheels and are linked together with lengths of stick licorice. The coal is crushed Oreos with black sprinkling sugar, and the cargo in the flatbed car is fruit shaped candy. The other trim is writing icing. (It says “Auguri” rather than “Happy Birthday” because we live in Italy.)
I added a picture of my son in his engineer’s hat as the driver, and pictures of his friends as passengers in the blue car, stuck on at the last minute with a little frosting.
My son loved it and all the kids were excited to pick which car they wanted their slice of cake to come from.
Train Cake Idea
Train cake by Cheryl S., North Royalton, OH
For my twins 2nd birthday I wanted each of them to have their own cake that they would be excited over and I wanted to make them myself. This made me very nervous worrying about getting two cakes done as well as all the other party details. My son is very into Thomas the Tank Engine so I bought the Wilton stand-up cake pan and changed their decorating examples to look like one of my sons toy Thomas trains. And Thomas’s number was changed to “2” for how old my son turned. Make sure you use pound cake with the stand-up cake pan and put a thick layer of icing under the cake so it stand easier on your cake plate, the cake never fell over once!
Wilton Pan Train Cake
Cake by Dawn G., Buffalo Grove, IL
I used a Wilton pan and then put it on a sheet cake and decorated it with balloons. My son LOVES Thomas!!!!!
Awesome Train Cake!
Cake by Lynda M., Dublin, Ireland
I’m afraid I can’t claim originality for this train cake as I used the design from Debbie Browne’s Character cake book. The basic cake is Maderia 12 x 8 and cut into 3 equal rectangular shapes (4 x 8 ) which are placed on top of sandwiched with butterfilling / jam. The train shape is cut appropriately. Debbie goes into great detail in her book and it takes quite a while !!! But I think the end result is worth it.
Train Cake for 3rd Birthday
Cake by Rhonda M., Tallahassee, FL
My son Larkin loves trains so when he wanted a train cake for his 3rd birthday I started with a 3D train cake mold for the actual cake. Candy faces for the passengers in the windows and the engineer and mallow mar cookies for the wheels. The train cars are made with candy molds and mini Oreos for wheels. The train cars are filled with pretzels for logs and other edibles. Everyone loved the way it turned out and since it was so long it was the table centerpiece as well…
Thomas the Train Cake
My three year old son is a huge Thomas fan! This really easy train cake idea came from my husband. I baked the cake (one box mix) in three different sized, round dishes: a 9″ round cake pan, a 5″ round dish, and a small custard dish. I stacked these asymmetrically and cut off part of the middle layer to form a slope. After frosting the entire thing in green frosting, I piped on train tracks winding up the cake (black frosting is easy to make by adding black paste coloring to chocolate frosting.) I added a “tunnel” (big black dot at the end of the tracks) at the base, and placed the smaller Thomas trains onto the tracks. I also made a blue cakeboard for water surrounding the ” island of Sodor .” Very quick and easy train cake!
Cool Train Cake
Train cake by Pen P., Berkeley, CA
I made this Thomas the Train cake for my three year-old nephew Zach who just loves Thomas. It was such a joy to see his face light up as soon as I brought this cake to their house.
I like to use edible decorations on my cakes as much as possible. I made The Thomas the Tank Engine image on top of the cake out of white chocolate candy wafers tinted to match the colors of the Thomas image. They were Xeroxed from a Thomas book. Then I enlarged this image 300x. I put a parchment paper on top of the Xerox copy, and then traced and filled the image using the tinted melted candy wafers. The image “slab” peels off after it has set for a few minutes. I placed it on an angle so Zach and the other kids can easily see it from where they’re seated.
The front and sides of the cake are decorated with trains on rolling hills. The train cars are made out of fruit-by-the-foot fruit leather, the car contents with assorted candy sprinkles, the train wheels with M&Ms, the trees out of green marshmallows. The rolling hills are made out of tinted rolled fondant. The billowing clouds are piped meringue buttercream.
Take a look at more Train Cakes…
