60th Birthday Cake
My dad turned 60 this year, so I really wanted to make him a birthday cake! He really likes 2CV cars and playing cards with his friends, so I combined them for the theme of the cake. He has a blue 2CV car that’s why I made 3 different shades of blue cars. He really liked his cake 🥰
To start I baked two vanilla and two chocolate 6″ cakes. For the filling, I made a simple strawberry mousse, which is just whipped cream with strawberry jam to taste. And I cut up some strawberries also for the filling. Then made some Swiss meringue buttercream. I started stacking the cake by laying down the first vanilla cake and piped a border of buttercream around to keep the strawberries inside the cake. Then I spread some strawberry jam on the cake and placed the cut-up strawberries on top. To fill the gaps between the strawberries and for more filling I spread the strawberry mousse over the strawberries, flush to the buttercream border. Then I layered the first chocolate cake on top and pressed a little bit. Then I repeated the filling steps and alternated the second vanilla and chocolate cake. When the cake was stacked I crumb coated it with the buttercream and put it in the fridge to chill and harden. When the buttercream on the cake wasn’t sticky anymore I iced the cake a final time using a cake scraper.Â
In the meantime, I made the fondant decorations. I found a really cool cookie cutter on Etsy of a 2CV car, so I had to buy it and the results are just amazing in my opinion. For the cars I coloured fondant 3 different shades of blue and rolled them out not too thin since the cutter had details that needed to be pressed in. It took 2 tries to know how thick the fondant needed to be but when I got it they turned out very nice. For the “60” on top, I rolled out some white fondant and pressed my SweetStamp “60” into it and cut it out with a circle cutter. Then I painted it with blue metallic food paint and I thought it would be cool also to paint the sides of the circle. I let the fondant dry out so it could stand up. When it was dry and ready for the cake I just used piping gel to glue it to a popsicle stick to stick it in the cake.
Then it was time to decorate the cake. I started by placing the cars on the side with a bit of water to help them stick. Then I painted the outlines of the cars (indents from the cutter) with black metallic food paint. I did this while they were on the cake instead of when I could paint them flat because it would help prevent smudges when sticking them to the cake. For the rest of the decorations I wanted to have cards on the cake, so I googled and found some edible playing cards, which looked really cool. I placed these edible cards on the top part around the cake having them stick out a bit. I placed them a bit wonky because I liked that look better. I didn’t use water to stick them on since they’re made of sugar and very thin, they would get deformed. And to finish the cake off I put the “60” cake topper on top.
I think it turned out really nice, quite simplistic but the theme is still really clear.
