Coolest Lightning McQueen Birthday Cake

I made this Lightning McQueen Birthday Cake for a friend’s 19th birthday, and she is a huge “Cars” fan, so she specially requested this. First, I made a 9×13 fudge marble swirl cake (with 2 cake mixes) for the base of the cake. Then, I made a red velvet cake in a bread loaf pan for the “car” part. I leveled the large cake and put them both in the freezer to “harden”.

To carve Lightning McQueen from the loaf cake, I used my son’s toy “Lightning” car he has that happened to be the perfect size! I used a small knife to carve out the shape of the car. I put a light crumb coat over both cakes and returned them to the freezer for the frosting to stiffen.

Next, I began decorating the base of the cake. I covered the whole cake in white frosting and let it harden in the fridge for a while. For the decorating, I used Wilton’s tubed icing, so I could screw the Wilton decorating tips right onto the tubes and not have to worry about coloring frosting & using piping bags. This made things a lot easier & lot less mess to clean up!

First, I drew the black checkers around the side of the cake, then outlined the “road” on top of the cake. I used crushed Oreos for the road, and packed them into the frosting really well so they wouldn’t roll off. Then, I used the grass tip to make green grass over the rest of the cake. Finally, I piped white lines on the road.

Next, I worked on the Lightning McQueen loaf cake. After placing it on top of the base cake, I spread some white icing where the “windshield” would be, then covered the rest of the cake in red icing. (If you don’t want to use the tube red icing, mix a whole jar of Wilton’s No-Taste Red food coloring into one can of ready-made white frosting, and it will be bright red.) I then used white, yellow, and orange to draw the details and other windows, and blue & black for the eyes. I cut the ends off of some Little Debbie chocolate rolls for the tires (chocolate donuts would work, too) and put a dot of red in the middle for the “hub caps”.

This Lightning McQueen Birthday Cake was a challenge to make, because I’ve never totally carved a cake before. It really wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, and I had a lot of fun doing it! The cake was a hit, and the “birthday girl” was very surprised!

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