Fire engine cake & football cake

It's son no 2's birthday on Tuesday. Always an emotional time for me but now he's 3 it seems my baby is well and truely growing up *sigh*

Today we had the family round for a bit of a do and I decided to make his cake for today.  Son no 2 decided he wanted a fire engine cake. When I agreed I really didn't think it was going to be that difficult but Oh My God ! I was covered in icing sugar, food colouring and bits of cake and thank God it turned out ok. At least he recognised what it was !

Side view

Back view

Front view

I used a basic sponge mixture in a 9 in square deep tin and then just cut and stacked to get the right shape. It was sandwiched with strawberry jam and buttercream. Brush the cake with warmed apricot jam and then red "ready roll" icing over the top. The decorations were split Oreo cookies for the wheels, licquorice allsorts for the lights and sirens and a licquorice wheel at the back for the hose. Otherwise I used a black food writing pen and white "ready roll" icing for the rest. The ladder was a curly wurly !

BASIC SPONGE

enough for 9in cake tin

8oz soft butter

8oz golden caster sugar

4 large eggs at room temperature

8oz self-raising flour

1 tsp vanilla extract

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy

Add the eggs one at a time, each with a spoon of flour to prevent curdling

Add the vanilla and then fold in the flour

Transfer to a greased and lined tin

Bake at 180 until the top is springy and a skewer comes out clean

Cool on a rack

For the butter cream use 1/2 butter to icing sugar so here I used 3oz butter to 6oz icing sugar.

Apologies for the imperial measurements here but for some reason I can only bake sponges in imperial !!

As we're on the subject of birthday cakes, below is a picture of the cake I made back in June for son no 1's 7th birthday.