I was asked at the very last minute by my son to make a surprise birthday cake for his best friend and could I incorporate his favorite things, his favorite movie as a kid, Cars, with Mater being his favorite character, his favorite games, Skyrim and Minecraft and his favorite series, Sherlock. Now his birthday is the day after mine and I would be at work from early till late on that particular day so it left me only a couple of days to figure out how to incorporate these characters and make it and hopefully nothing would go wrong as I would not have the time to re-do anything.
So after the initial mind numbing WHAT??!! I sat down and drew out what I hoped my overall creation would end up looking like. I made up a batch of my delicious mud cake and used a large loaf tin so that I would have my basic size and shape without having to carve too much as time was not on my side. The mechanics were made entirely out of fondant and were very slow on the hardening so I was not as elaborate as I would have liked it to be if I had more time
After carving the cake was covered in dark choc. ganache and then covered in brown fondant and I hand painted the “rust” look. Sherlock and then the Skyrim dragon were done the day before to allow to dry a bit before being placed.
I think it came together quite nicely and the birthday boy was blown away when they eventually brought out the cake. My son had the idea of buying a supermarket cake and sitting a tiny Cars toy on top, a Lightning McQueen one, and bringing it out first. They all looked at it and “Is that it??!!” was heard from the other room. The birthday boy didn’t look happy but was still very polite…..lol….. His face was priceless when they brought out his real cake.