Monster Truck Cake

  
 I love creating cakes for many reasons, most of all for the challenge and the reward (not so much the money but more for a client's enjoyment).  A client contacted me asking for a Grave Digger Monster Truck Cake.  I proposed that I could make the actual truck as a cake topper and the client went for it.  I was thrilled to take on this challenge. I had made a mariokart cake topper before but that was much smaller scale and I really wanted to make this truck monstrous. I knew I wanted to make the truck out of rice krispie treats and fondant and I remembered seeing a truck tutorial on my one of my favorite cake blogs Jessicakes, so I read that thoroughly and began to tackle this new project.  Here is my tutorial for the truck, much of it based on Jessicakes tutorial so a big thank you to Jessica for her ingenuity and brilliant work.

     The client requested a buttercream cake as she was not a fan of fondant.  The cake is a 10" square chocolate chip yellow cake with chocolate swiss meringue buttercream filling.  I covered the cake in white chocolate ganache and buttercream on top of that.  My initial intention was to cover it only in white chocolate ganache however my ganache was hardening on me very quickly and I had trouble achieving a very smooth finish. Mind you this was about 2am in the morning as I'm doing this and the cake needed to be delivered at 8am that same morning - so I was starting to get very nervous. For over an hour I worked on the ganache and tried heating my bench scraper as well as wetting the ganache with boiling water but it just wouldn't cooperate. So I decided to whip up some crusting vanilla buttercream and applied that to the cake, placed it in the fridge to set up, and used the viva paper towel method to smooth it out, and voila, much better! 
     For the top of the cake, I wanted it to look like dirt but I wanted to keep the sides clean so I made a rope of black fondant and outlined the top of the cake. I took some pulverized oreos from the food processor and carefully placed it on top of the cake making sure not to go over the edge of the fondant.

  
 The sides of the cake were decorated with green flames to match the flames on the truck. They were freehand cut from fondant with an exacto knife by my wonderful husband who is starting to show some interest in working with fondant - yay!  He did a great job, much better than my few attempts at it. He also sculpted the little crushed cars - great job.
     So finally, the cake was complete - the truck was in fact monstrous. My initial plan was to put the truck on a ramp to make it look like it was jumping over the crushed cars but the truck was much larger than I originally planned but I think it came out fantastic and the client and birthday boy were elated by it.  That is the hugest reward of all.