Craft Corner: Toro Rosso Birthday Cake

August 28, 2012

Here’s a Toro Rosso cake I made for Tom’s 23rd Birthday hence the car number! I don’t think Toro Rosso‘s season is quite that bad yet. The whole cake and all the decorations are hand made by me.

Click below to see how it was made.

This was the most difficult thing I have ever made! I started off with my normal sponge:

200g butter
200g caster sugar
1tsp vanilla extract
4 medium eggs
200g self-raising flour

To make the sponge you beat together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy, then add the eggs one at a time (make sure everything is at room temperature are it will prevent the mixture from splitting). Once you’ve got a smooth consistency add the flour in and fold it all together.

As it was Tom’s Birthday cake and he loves lemon I added lemon zest and juice instead of the vanilla extract that I’d normally add.To stick the layers of cake together I made a lemon syrup, by melting sugar in a pan and added lemon juice.

To form the shape of the car I baked several different sized sponges, pretty much using all the tins I have! I baked a large square cake and a sponge in a loaf tin plus two sandwich tin sponges. I wasn’t sure exactly how accurate I was going to make the car so I just started off making the main body of the car, leaving the side pods really simple. I added the engine cover, which is just a rounded triangle. Built the car up around the cockpit and added the nose and front wing.

To decorate the cake I rolled out some blue ready roll icing, unfortunately I had to use a royal blue as they didn’t have any dark blue! I’d never iced a cake before and I probably had the icing too thick, but I laid it over the cake and smoothed it out and pushed it into the crevices to form the shape of the car.

The Toro Rosso bull is white icing cut out into roughly the right shape, which I then painted with red food colouring gel mixed with vodka. I used a toothpick to dig out the white areas to add details to the bull.

I wrote the sponsors using white and red food gel and used edible gold glitter to add the fancy patterns on the livery.

The tyres are sponge cut into circles with black icing on, I made small grey cylinders of icing to look like a kind of suspension.

The following pictures show the process step by step: