RV Cake

Our family loves to camp.  We started with the basic tent, moved up to a pop up tent trailer and just recently made the move up to an RV.  This was a LONG process - over 9 months.  I think we seriously had our RV sales guy thinking about running when he saw us coming.  Anyway - in order to thank Rex for all of his patience with us, I decided to make him a special cake of his own.

I have to say - I am NOT a big fan of carved cakes.  They get all crumby when you carve them and I have had troubles in the past with putting fondant over them.  This one, was actually a dream!

I started with a 1/2 sheet of triple chocolate fudge cake, split in in fourths and stacked it (with SMBC in between).  I then started angling the front with my bread knife, a little at a time.  I think I actually ended up making about 5 cuts before I got the angle right.  Once that was done, I crumb coated the whole cake with SMBC and then chilled it in the fridge.  While that was happening, I made the pine trees out of sugar cones and green royal icing and let them dry.  I also made the wheels, and the trailer hitch out of black fondant and let them all dry as well.  The hitch I put in toothpicks on the ends, so that I would be able to attach it to the trailer easily once I was done.

Remember the graduated color cake?  Remember how I made A LOT of green fondant.  Well, I used that to cover my cake board.  Things always happen for a reason.  :-)

Once the cake was chilled, I covered the entire thing with white fondant.  Once it was smoothed, I used a picture of our new RV and copied it as best as I could with the accent pieces.  The graphics were painted on with gel food coloring.  Then it was put it all on the cake board.  I had some leftover candy rocks from a golfing cake I had done, so I put them in a circle with pretzel sticks - voila!  Instant fire.

Rex loved his cake, we love our RV - life is good!