I’ve tried to make a character cake before when I created a Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story cake for a work colleague and it turned out pretty good if I do say so myself! However, this was a 2D cake and my latest cake request was for a 3D Thomas the Tank Engine Cake for three little boys’ birthdays. The pressure was on for my cake to truly reflect such an icon to a three year old boy!
Luckily I found a really useful blog which provided me with detailed steps. This really helped me conceptualise the shape of the cake and whilst I didn’t follow every step it made a great starting point and I would recommend the blog to anyone who was willing to try! Thomas the Tank Engine Tutorial.
I shaped the train shape from 2 x 12 inch square vanilla cakes (using the Primrose Bakery vanilla sponge recipe which has now become my favourite trustworthy recipe). Once I had cut all the sections I sandwiched these together with vanilla buttercream (using the Primrose Bakery recipe for vanilla buttercream) and dirty iced the entire cake. This is sometimes referred to as a crumb coat.