Car Cake Design For Boys (How to Make)

🧾Supplies Required

• Wilton 3D car cake pan
• Car shaped cake baked using butter pound cake recipe – since the cake tin is not the standard round or square shape, I had to recalculate the recipe so that I had enough batter to fill the cake pan. Here is how I estimate cake batter for odd-shaped cake tins. Full recipe is in the recipe card at the bottom of this page.
• Butter icing – this is a stiffer version of buttercream. The consistency is stiff enough to allow me to shape it with my hands! I had this icing tinted in red, dark grey, and black.
• Buttercream in green (for the grass) and some in black for the windscreen outline, the car wipers, car’s eyes, and smiling mouth.
• Fondant in blue (for the wordings on the cake)
• Wilton tip number 3  for outline icing on the cake
• Wilton grass tip number 233  for the grass on the cake board.
• Food coloring in red, black, blue, white and green.
• Disposable piping bags
• Spatula
• Alphabet cutters

👩‍🍳How to Make

Step 1: Bake the 3D Car Cake

Since the cake was baked in a shaped pan, there was no need for any sculpting work.

Once the cake was baked, I let it rest in the pan for 5 minutes before turning it out onto a wire rack. The cake should be placed on the wire rack, facing up.

Step 2: Cover the Cake with Butter Icing

I started off with the body of the car and covered it in red butter icing. I smoothened the butter icing on the body of the cake, leaving out the car windshield, windows, and the wheels.

Step 3: Add the Windshields and Side Windows

Next, I covered the windshields and side windows. I used untinted butter icing for these. The butter icing had a natural ivory hue to it because of the butter. And so I left the color as such.

Step 4: Make the Wheels, Bumper and Lights

For the wheels, I used black butter icing and dark gray icing. To make the grey icing, I added some white and a little bit of black food coloring into the butter icing.

Once the wheels were done, I added the lights, both at the front and back of the car, followed by the bumpers. I transformed the lights at the front of the car into the car’s eyes by piping a tiny dot of black buttercream in the center.

The lights themselves were ivory butter icing shaped into oval balls and flattened. The icing was stiff like I mentioned earlier, so I actually worked on this with my hands, similar to working with fondant. And finally, using black buttercream, I piped a smiling mouth for the car, borders for the windshield and windows, and a set of wipers.

Step 5: Add the Lettering and the Buttercream Grass

To finish decorating the car, I outlined the windows with black buttercream using Wilton tip #3.

As for the wordings, I used blue tinted fondant and used the Wilton alphabet cutters to cut out the ‘happy birthday’ letters. I simply placed the cut letters on the cake and they stuck well to the butter icing without having to have any special glue.

Once the car was done, I piped green colored buttercream icing for the grass all around the cake, on the cake board.

 And with that, the cake was done. Overall, this car shaped cake was fairly easy to make, the only thing that took me some time was working with the butter icing as it requires a fair bit of smoothing which I did with my icing spatula.