Yesterday was Lucas’s second birthday.  I can’t believe that it’s come round so quickly!  It wasn’t so long ago that he was a plump, pink little baby who gurgled all the time, and tried to poke sticks of celery up his nose!  And now he’s so big and grown up!

As Lucas loves to watch buses go by and is also quite a big fan of Thomas the Tank Engine, we thought that a Bertie the Bus cake would be just the ticket.  As Sod’s law dictates, he took a sudden dislike to Thomas the day I started the cake, so I spent all week worrying that he’d hate his cake.  Thankfully he screeched, “Bertie buuuuussssss!!!!!” when he came home and saw his cake and decorations.  Phew!

“Oooooh, Bertie Bus!”

This is the most complicated cake I’ve ever made, but also the most fun.  I loved every bit of it, but I especially loved seeing the big grin on Lucas’s face whenever he ran up to the table and poked Bertie’s nose.  So cute!

The birthday boy is very excited!

Sometimes I think that I’m crazy for putting so much effort into birthday cakes.  I’m sure Lucas wouldn’t mind if his birthday cakes came from the supermarket, but that just seems wrong.  I grew up with mum making our birthday cakes herself and I loved seeing what she came up with each year.  The duckpond cake was always a favourite, though.  Happy cake memories should be a part of childhood and I’ll keep making them for Lucas until he starts asking for scale reproductions of the Millennium Falcon or the Starship Enterprise.  At that point, he can make his own damn cakes!

Happy birthday, Lucas!!  Love you!

3D Bertie the Bus cake

NB This is a very rough how-to guide.

You’ll need:

• approximately 2kg of sugarpaste (fondant)
• paste colourings in black, green and red
• 2 large chocolate pound cakes, baked in a large loaf tin (mine has an 8-cup capacity)
• 500g buttercream
• royal icing
• large cakeboard (mine was 16″ square)

Work started about a week ago.  I sculpted the face while Dave watched the England/Belarus football match which meant that he was pretty much a captive audience and subject to constantly being asked for his opinion.  I used this tutorial for a Thomas the Tank Engine cake as an instruction manual and also nabbed Lucas’s Bertie toy as a model.  As much as I’d love to be, I’m not a natural cake decorator.  I think I’m improving, but I only haul out fondant and colouring pastes once a year, so practising is hard.  I keep watching Ace of Cakes and dreaming about being that damn good.

Cutting the basic shape & adding the nose

Bertie has cheeks, nose and mouth.  About to add the eyes.

But, for a rank amateur, I’m really, really pleased with how Bertie’s face turned out.  It’s by no means perfect, but it is a recognisable face that even manages to look cute.

The finished face

Next I made a set of wheels and covered the cake board to give Bertie a nice rural setting to drive through.  I was going to do a duck pond and chocolate fences, but decided at the last minute that it might be bordering on overkill.  Not to mention a complete excess of sugar!

The body of the cake is a chocolate and sour cream pound cake.  I wanted something quite sturdy—it had to be able to cope with an overhang without crumbling or snapping—but still decently moist and using plenty of sour cream ensured the perfect texture.  I baked two over-sized loaves which I then froze before carving the bus shape out.  Next time I would slice the cakes into layers before freezing as it is really difficult to cut straight layers with frozen cake.  Freezing does, however, make carving beautifully easy.  I used a cookie cutter slightly bigger than the one I used for the wheels to cut out space for the wheels and followed the shape of the toy to create that of the cake.  Make sure to keep the overhang nice and thick so that it won’t snap under the weight of the fondant as it is being draped over the cake.

Once carved, I sandwiched the layers together with orange buttercream and then gave it a crumb coat with even more buttercream before draping the cake with a huge sheet of red fondant.  This turned into a real family affair.  While Mum and I smoothed out the buttercream on one side of the cake, Dave was busily trowelling it onto the other side before disappearing to roll out the fondant.  Another top tip… wear gloves when colouring large amounts of fondant red.  Otherwise you’ll be scrubbing frantically at your hands like Lady Macbeth.

Lots of smoothing and rubbing turned this alien monstrosity into this bus!

After lots of smoothing and a little cutting, the cake started to take shape.  I cut some windows out of grey fondant and glued them on with a smear of warm water.  Last of all I added the black wheel arches and tried to shine them up a little.  And then it was bedtime.

The next morning I mixed up the smallest possible batch of royal icing—which still made loads—and glued the wheels into the wheel arches then carefully attached Bertie’s face with a generous amount of royal icing.  For additional support I’d pushed a couple of pieces of linguine into the back of Bertie’s face so those helped hold the face in place until the icing set.  Last of all, I piped some white lines on the road and then Bertie was done!