the train cake

The end of November I was looking through a magazine's december issue. It had all these gift ideas in it of course. I ran across an image of the cutest train cake. Nine little cakes shaped like train cars made from a specialty cake pan. Darling. I took note.

This pan:


Matt loves trains. Matt would like a train cake for his birthday. I needed me a train cake pan. They sell them at Williams-Sonoma, so yeah, it's spendy. After some friends and I discussed how cute the pan was, I showed it to Steve, who agreed it was a cute pan and I could probably manage to find several uses for it.

That weekend I went shopping at the mall in the big city. The mall that just happens to have a W-S store. Since Steve's response to the train cake pan was positive, I decided to buy one. When I got home I was all excited to show my purchases and sheepishly added that I had gone shopping at W-S. "Do I need to take out a second mortgage?" asks my husband. I laughed and replied that no, I had just bought one thing. "not the cake pan." yes, the cake pan.

It seems that my sweet husband had bought it for me online that week for a Christmas present. Now I had two train cake pans. Steve took the one I bought back to the store.

I used the other one to make this for Matt for his birthday:

It's much cuter in person and with the white balance right on my camera. That's a double cake, one chocolate and one vanilla. (BTW, the recipe that came with the pan is fantastic, which is cool because I have a hard time finding recipes for scratch cakes that I like. ) The trains don't need a lot of frosting so it actually takes less time than decorating a traditional layer cake (and it looks better than the traditional layer cakes I always manage.)

The cake was a hit. Matt loved it and had a ball putting the M&M wheels on each car. I do have pictures of individual cars, but you won't be subjected to those unless you happen to be one of those unfortunates who is subjected to my scrapbooks.