Coolest Lightning McQueen Cars Cake

My sister asked me to bake a Lightning McQueen style car cake for a friend for her son’s 1st birthday. This is the first time I’ve made a cake for anyone outside my family so I was really nervous but it turned out pretty cute. The friend wanted the LM cake for just her son so I also made 2 dozen cupcakes and decorated them with some sprinkles and Cars cupcake picks to go along with it. The cupcake liners and picks and the cupcake display were all at Walmart.

The car is literally one whole cake mix in a bread pan. It was almost the perfect shape. I then carved out the hood and the spoiler. I thought about doing the dents for the wheel hubs but I just ran out of patience and dirty frosted the whole thing. If I ever do it again, or any other colored frosting cake, I would dirty frost in the same color.

I used white frosting to dirty frost and then when I went to use the red frosting, the white kept seeping through. Every time I try to tint frosting it usually turns out the wrong color so I cheated and used the big Wilton tubes of decorating icing in red. I used about 3 of them to cover the entire car. I also used Cake Mate bakery icing in yellow, for the lighting bolts and Duncan Hines brand frosting in both whipped chocolate and whipped vanilla for the rest. I just used decorater sprinkles on
the cupcakes. I would have liked to add more accents, like outline the windshield/eyes and add windows but I ran out of time since I was given less than 24 hours notice so I didn’t grab everything I needed to do that.

Something I learned off the interwebs to smooth out the frosting is to wait for the frosting to dry and then if you take a paper towel (with or without texture) and
lay it on the cake and then just gently pat, it really smooths the frosting out and covers it a bit better, gives it an almost fondant look without the fondant (which I don’t really like much, and the friend didn’t want because she was afraid her son would choke on it).

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