Tractor Cake

My little Aaron had his first birthday party this week. I took Hailey's dump truck idea and modified it quite a bit. I wish I had taken step by step pictures like Hailey but I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants on this one, so here's the general idea.

1- I baked a medium sized bread pan and 2 mini bread pans. Cut the larger loaf in half and stack to make the cab and cut about 3 quarters of one mini loaf to make the front. The other loaf becomes the trailer and the 1/4 left got cut in two for hay bales. As with Hailey's, I also used styrofoam blocks underneath.

2- I used mento's for head lights, cherry air heads for wheel wells on back wheels, do-nuts from the bakery for the back wheels and hostess ones for the front, a gum drop for the caution triangle, black red vines licorice with dowels in them for the axels, trailer neck and exhaust, 2 graham crackers for the roof, cake squares frosted and rolled in yellow coconut for the hay bails, and oreo for the dirt.

Now, understand that my husband is going to school to be a tractor mechanic and so my cake had to be mechanically and structurally correct (down to the color) and would have been even more so if I hadn't have told him to get out of my kitchen before I went crazy! So, you could probably do away with a few details if it would make things easier.

Chocolate Buttermilk Cake with Whipping Cream Frosting

This was a standard for our birthdays growing up as children. The whipping cream "frosting" is light and fluffy and not too rich. It's a perfect complement to the cake.

Chocolate Buttermilk Cake
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. soda
3 T (heaping) baking cocoa (almost 1/2 cup)
2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups buttermilk

Cream butter and sugar well. Mix in order given except divide buttermilk and flour and add alternately. Grease and flour the bottom of a 13x9 baking pan. Or use two rounds and grease the bottoms + use wax paper (that's how I do it and it comes out perfectly every time). Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

Whipping Cream Frosting
whipping cream (roughly 1 pint)
baking cocoa (roughly 3 T)
vanilla (roughly 1 T)
powdered sugar (roughly 1/2 cup)

Whip the cream until desired fluffiness. Fold in the rest of the ingredients. I said "roughly" on the ingredient list since I've never followed a real recipe, I just add in ingredients until it's how I like it. Experiment until you find the flavor you like best.

The Dump Truck Cake!

So here is the cake I did for chub-a-bub's first birthday. Not like he cared what it was, but I wanted to see if I could make a dump truck cake- it was so fun to do, and really not that hard. You don't have to be a super-duper cake decorator to do this cake. It's based on  a cake I found

on the woman's day web site, with a few changes. It would be easy to modify this into a fire truck, army truck, school bus, any type of truck really.

The cake is baked in two bread loaf pans, with one cut one in half for the front and the cab. I trimmed the cab about an inch to make it shorter, then beveled the front 

for a slanted windshield.

The cake is mounted on a foil-covered piece of styrofoam with a bunch of toothpicks, to raise it off the surface a bit. That way it looks like the chocolate donut wheels are holding it up! The truck bed is made of graham crackers, sitting on stacked oreos to tilt it up. 

Finished product! I filled the bed with oreo dirt I made in my food processor. (You can sprinkle this on your ice cream at the party.) And used brown sugar for more surrounding dirt.

      Rollo headlights and orange and yellow Spree cab lights.

This is what is looked like after a major collision with the birthday boy! (Actually after a while everybody just sort of grabbed a fork and started digging in to it.) Definitely funnest cake I have ever made!!