Race Car Cake!

We had so much fun with Maddux's Race Car Cake, that I thought I would share the directions with you! I found a lot of recipes and ideas online, so I just sort of combined everything I found to make my own! **Oh, and yes, I do realize that the "3" is backwards. We had a candle malfunction of some sort. :)


Let's get started with 4 chocolate (or any flavor you like) 8 or 9-inch round cakes. I just used the boxed cakes since I piled on the buttercream icing later. You will need to cut a small semi-circle out of one stack of cakes so that they fit together snugly. No worries if you don't make a perfect cut, icing fixes everything. I am thinking of having a bumper sticker made that says so.


I suppose that you can buy the icing in the containers, but it is so easy to make your very own buttercream icing! And wouldn't your mother-in-law be impressed? Well, my MIL wasn't, but maybe yours will be. You will need: one bag of confectioners' sugar (about 7 1/2 cups), 1 cup of shortening, 1 cup of butter, 2 tsp. of vanilla and 2-6 T milk depending on the moisture in your house and the consistency that you want. Since no one would see any of the white icing, I used butter flavored shortening instead of plain old shortening and real vanilla instead of the Wilton Clear Vanilla. This recipe makes about 6 cups of frosting, and you could very easily cut it in half for a smaller cake.


You will start off my creaming together the softened butter and the shortening. See? Easy.


Add in the vanilla and the confectioners' sugar. Go slow with the sugar so you don't cover your kitchen in a fine mist of white. I don't ever follow my own directions and will be cleaning up the stuff until next Tuesday. Once all of the confectioners' sugar is incorporated, it will be stiff. Add the milk in 1 Tablespoon at a time. Slowly. You don't want to add in too much. Once the frosting is smooth and has a spreadable consistency, you are done.

Voila. Homemade buttercream icing. Commence sugar coma.

Frost your cakes with a thin layer of the buttercream. Don't worry about perfection here because you are not going to be able to see this anyway.

Now you will need 1-2 cups of chocolate cookie crumbs. In most normal stores you would be able to buy these as crumbs, but since I live in the middle of nowhere, I am going to have to do this the old fashioned way. Using my handy dandy rolling pin I will squish the poor unsuspecting Teddy Grahams into crumbs. So very sad.

Once you have the 1-2 cups of crumbs (which I used closer to 1 cup), you will need two round bowls (or whatever you can find, obviously). Center these in the middle of the cakes, and ignore the fact that this cake suddenly looks more appropriate for a Bachelor party.

Carefully spread the cookie crumbs around the bowls.

When you remove the bowls, it looks like this.

Now, fill in those circles with green sprinkles. Fun times.
Now, you can apply sprinkles to the sides of the cake, but I couldn't figure out how to do that without making a monumental mess, so I just used a star tip and piped tinted buttercream icing all around the cake. It takes a lot of time, but Maddux will tell you that it was worth it. This is a great time to catch up on episodes of MTV's America's Best Dance Crew. Not that I would watch it, but, um, you could, if you wanted to.

Once the piping is done, you can add the white Good & Plenty's for the lines in the race track. I am sure that you could also use tic tacs or something else, but I love Good & Plenty's.

For the checkered flags, I just used a marker and some cardstock, but I have heard rumors of clip art being on the Internet, which would save you some time. I just happen to be very fond of markers. Attach the flags to some toothpicks and you are almost done!

Add some race cars and you are finished! See? That wasn't so bad!

Brad was upset that the number of candles did not coordinate with the number of years of Maddux's life, but Maddux is obsessed with blowing out candles, so we went big. Try not to set the checkered flags on fire, not that anyone would, um, but just in case.