A Train Birthday Cake Step by Step in Pictures

My sweet boy turned 2 a few days ago and you cannot have a birthday without a cake. So I turned to a beloved birthday companion of my childhood, the Women's Weekly Birthday Cake book. In this marvellous book Jeremy and I found a train cake that appealed to him and I got to work.

To make this cake, I started with a double butter cake mix and baked it in a rectangular slice pan. This made a large cake of a good height to work with.

I then cut this rectangular cake into three strips about 8 cm wide. I had a fourth strip left over that wasn't quite wide enough.

As you can see below, I have cut each 8cm wide strip in half to create the train and carriages. I then cut one of the halves in half again to make two think pieces of cake to give some height to the carriages. The jam roll sits on the front of the train as a rounded nose.

I iced each section of the train with a different coloured butter cream icing. The original train has four carriages, but two were enough for me!

I then cut liquorice traps into thin strips to outline the train and carriages and used choc mint biscuits for the wheels. The liquorice also forms the train tracks.

Then I just decorated with smarties and liquorice all-sorts to create the windows and lights on the train. I used a large marshmallow with a pipe cleaned stuck in it to show the smoke coming out of the smoke stack. The carriages are filled with marshmallows at Jeremy's request.

Finally, I stuck the sleeper sections of the train track onto the cake board with icing and stuck some smarties onto the wheels. Hooray! An amazing cake for a little boy.

 Jeremy absolutely beamed as we sung happy birthday and was delighted with his cake. He sampled the marshmallows immediately! Success.