Number Eight Racetrack Cake

  What kind of cake does an eight-year-old boy need?  Why, a racetrack cake, naturally.

Poor Owen didn't have a choice this year.  His mother had this one in her head for a long time.  I remembered a picture of a racetrack cake in one of my mom's cake decorating books that I used to page through as a young dreamer.  It was a little simpler than this one, and the car bodies were oval-shaped, fake-fruit-flavored, hard candies with Smarties for wheels.  The good old Minute Stop on 31 had Werther's hard caramels, Skittles and a friendly cashier.

The concept cars needed to be explained to the kids, but after they understood, they were all picking out which one was theirs.

I used a tube pan to bake two cakes, then joined them together to make a figure eight.  I had to curve off an edge of one of the cakes so they wouldn't look like two awkward round cakes attempting to mingle.  I frosted the sides and most of the top with a chocolate butter frosting, then piped on a road of gray-tinted decorator icing.  I smoothed the bumps in the road with a metal spatula dipped in hot water, then added Cocoa Puffs and granola for rocks. The most fun was free-handing the white road paint and lettering.  What a treacherous roadway.

two angel food cake pans = racetrack

Owen loves his cake.  Here he is, complete with campout dirt.

And he liked the cupcakes I brought to his class, because they looked like they came from the store.  (The deli trays helped a lot.)

Stripe your icing tint right inside your decorating bag, add white frosting and pipe away!