I made the bottom layer of this Homemade Monster Mutt & El Toro Loco Truck Cake a 15″ x 11″ chocolate cake, using Hershey’s chocolate cake recipe. Put in on 3 taped-together, foil-covered cake boards. Covered cake with Hershey’s recipe for chocolate frosting, sprinkled it with tan and brown ‘Turtle Sprinkles’, and stuck on candy letters “Happy Birthday Marcus”, as well as plastic toy pieces I’d bought as a gift but decided to use for the cake instead! (dirt mound with crushed cars; 2 grey crushed cars; orange cones).
This let me know how much space was left for the trucks. Measured the available space with ruler and carved the truck bodies accordingly from store-bought pound cakes, approx. 1 1/2 cake per truck. Cut cake in 1/2- bottoms for truck bottom and undercarriage, top for cab, hood, and truck bed. Carved cabs (sloping each end) from rounded pound cake tops, held pieces together with buttercream frosting. Covered trucks with light ‘crumb layer’ of buttercream frosting.
Had already prepared different colored fondant batches in my mixer with various food color gels (orange & copper for El Toro’s body, brown and a little orange for Mutt’s body, Ivory for his muzzle, black to make grey for undercarriage of trucks, choc. fondant with black gel for black for bottom half of truck bodies and tires, also used some pre-colored fondant from store in primary colors), a bit of vanilla and a little confectioners sugar.
Covered bottom, rectangular pieces of pound cakes with black chocolate rolled fondant. Placed them on top of Rice Krispie treat support blocks (dipped in melted dark choc. and allowed to harden) and used buttercream as glue. Covered Cab/Hood/Bed pieces with orange fondant for Toro and Brown/Tan for Mutt. Glued these onto rectangular truck bottom pieces with buttercream.
Tires: Krispy Kreme cruller donuts covered with chocolate fondant (recipe from internet) and hubcaps are white and grey fondant. Tiny bit of water for ‘glue’ to make fondant stick to fondant. Placed tires on sides of truck body, pushed them into the cake frosting, and held in place by lollipop sticks pierced into tires and rice krispie treats. Truck beds covered in leftover Hershey’s chocolate frosting for candle placement. El Toro Loco’s horns are lollipop sticks covered with white fondant, tips painted red with gel icing. Finished decorating mostly with fondant, plus chocolate licorice for Mutt’s tail (made hole in fondant with toothpick, widened it, and stuck licorice in), fruit roll-up for his tongue, and some buttercream frosting piping for words on trucks. Black sparkle icing gel came in very handy too for outlining windows, Mutt’s nose wrinkles, etc. Undercarriage made from bits of grey fondant rolled into ‘snakes’ and stuck onto truck body with water. Trucks would start leaning if kept out of fridge too long; would decorate for 1/2 hr., then refrigerate for 45 min. or so to re-set.
It all held together very well in the end, and got many, many compliments!
The idea behind this cake is amazing! However, being one of Monster Jam’s biggest fans since I was a kid myself, I would take all measures to make sure this cake was perfect, including making sure the scale is the correct size (proportion/size). The horns on this El Torro Loco truck are way off scale! They are too big! It draws your eye into staring at it because it doesn’t look right! Other than that, this is a very cute cake!