Race Car Cake

I spent my Friday evening making a race-car themed cake for a colleague's son's birthday party.

Lessons learned:

Buy red fondant. I bought pre-tinted black fondant, with which I was pleased, but all my attempts at tinting white fondant red looked like whoopie-cushion rubber. Ew. So the purple stripes were supposed to be red, and I think it would have looked far better as red. Oh well.

Dig out a well for buttercream. With fondant, you really want just a thin layer of buttercream as a crumb layer between the cake and the fondant. Too much between layers, and the cake settles, making the fondant all bulgy. So with fondant, you miss out on the buttercream frosting. Instead, I hollowed out a quarter-inch well between layers of the cake, filled them with buttercream, and topped them with the next layer. That will give every slice a decent amount of frosting, without all the buttercream on the outside that just squashes out everywhere when you smooth the fondant over it.

The artist is always most critical of her own work, but it's not my best cake, mostly because of the lack of red. It looks a lot more pastel in the pictures than it really was. I do like the checkered-flag effect with the black and white. And it was a nice opportunity to refine my fondant techniques.