Thomas the Tank Engine Cake - The Baking Backpacker

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.

Next I added another layer of buttercream and added Renshaw blue fondant icing. I’ve used several different fondants but this Renshaw variety that I purchased from Lakeland was incredibly easy to use and was very soft and pliable. I would thoroughly recommend it and it comes in a variety of colours. Finally Thomas was beginning to look like a train.

Then began the detailing of Thomas….

I used red, black, grey and blue fondant icing (all Renshaw except for the grey which was made using black colour paste) for the detailing along with red, black and yellow royal icing (coloured using Squires Kitchen colour pastes). I was really happy with the final outcome and I hope the three little boys were too!!!!!!

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