Aston Martin supercar birthday cake

This year my boyfriend bought himself a new car which for obvious reasons is his pride and joy. So when it came to his birthday I thought he would appreciate the idea of a cake in honour of his car – and it would give me another opportunity to use my airbrush kit.

 

I’ve made a car cake before which was OK in terms of learning how to carve the cake; it ended up a bit messy as I wasn’t particularly good at covering cakes, and cutting out the shapes for the windscreen etc was a little awkward, but I liked the overall effect. This time I found an excellent tutorial online by Paul Delaney and tried to follow it but I didn’t have quite all the necessary tools or skills, or indeed time! Still, I am quite pleased with how this turned out.

 

My boyfriend loves chocolate cake and I knew the cake needed to be fairly dense to make it easy to carve, so I found this recipe on Lindy’s Cakes for a chocolate fudge cake and followed the instructions. I had a bit too much batter for the loaf tin so I used the rest to make some cupcakes.

 

 

 

I made the cake in a loaf tin this time – last time I used a round tin, and cut off the sides and placed them on top of the cake to make the body of the car. But my boyfriend has an Aston Martin which is a low, wide car, so I didn’t want to make it in the same way as last time. Instead I made the cake in a loaf tin and when it was cool, I carved the front and back to create the bonnet and boot and a slope up to the roof.

 

 

The car also flares out a bit at the headlights so I shaved a little off the sides of the cake so the outer corners were wider. You can see it starting to take shape here.

 

 

 

 

To cover the cake I made a simple chocolate ganache from plain chocolate and cream, waited until it had cooled and spread it over the car.

I put it in the fridge to set and then covered the cake with rolled-out white fondant. I used white because I was planning to airbrush the cake but if you don’t have an airbrush and don’t want a white car, obviously use coloured fondant at this stage.

 

I marked out the lines where the windows would go – because the car is black and the windows look black I wasn’t going to do them a different colour.

 

My airbrush kit is really easy to use – I’ve described how I used it before in this post about my carrot-shaped carrot cake. It allowed me to spray the whole car black leaving a fairly shiny coating; I was also able to build up the colour in areas where I wanted to make the windscreen look darker for instance.

 

I roughly followed the instructions in the tutorial for making the hub caps. I couldn’t make the wheels the same thickness as it was a relatively small cake – we got about ten slices out of it but I thought if I hollowed out enough space for four wheels there wouldn’t be much cake left! So rather than making the thick black tyre as the tutorial showed, I made it flat. I did make the hub cap element but struggled to cut the star shape neatly as I didn’t have a cutter the right size and it was quite fiddly.

 

 

I made the wheel from a mixture of fondant and flower paste, which I only had in white, so I then sprayed the parts that needed to be black with the airbrush. The silver parts were very small and I’m not sure how easy they would have been to airbrush; besides I didn’t have any silver paint for the airbrush. What I did have however was a little bottle of edible silver paint from a German company called Mein Cupcake, which also has the UK website Cake Mart which was very easy to use and just the right consistency – quite thick and shiny when applied. The only downside is that it doesn’t come with a brush in the bottle and you need to use a small paintbrush, but I guess the plus side is that you get more paint in the bottle that way!

 

I really liked the effect that I got on the hub cap and think that I will definitely be using this kind of edible paint for other projects. It cost £5 and is available from CakeMart, a brilliant website I discovered recently that has pretty much everything you could ever want for baking and cake decorating.

 

To finish the car I cut out triangles from the fondant/flower paste mix to make headlights, and painted these silver as well. I also bought an edible ink pen for a few pounds on Amazon and used that to carefully write in the number plate on a strip of fondant/flower paste; I did two for the front and back of the car. I applied the wheels and the other small parts with edible glue. I placed the cake on a board which I had covered with sugarpaste, and presented it to the birthday boy.

 

I was quite pleased with how this turned out even though it wasn’t anywhere near as good as the one in the online tutorial. The cake tasted really good too – even though it was dense enough to carve it was still really light and fluffy. I didn’t think I could split and fill it so relied on the chocolate ganache around the outside to give it the added flavour and texture and it did work really well.

 

 

Thanks to Cake Mart for sending me the metallic silver food paint to review, all opinions are my own.