This cake was made by me for my youngest son's first birthday!!! My boys LOVE tractors and Bob the Builder, along with just about anything with wheels. I've looked all over online for Bob the Builder cakes and I really wanted to make this one as close as I could to the real thing. I have zero professional cake training so this is all me. Since the original show is "clay-mation", it made it very easy to duplicate the clay character's look with fondant. I really love making fondant decorations for my cakes, so this cake was a lot of fun!!!

I always love when people add a lot of description to how they created their cakes, so here goes! I created all the vehicles out of fondant (they are NOT plastic toys!!) Everything about this cake is edible aside from wooden dowel rods placed through the cake itself, three of the vehicles, and the chord coming down out of Lofty (the blue crane).

Muck (the red dumptruck) is 100% edible. I'd like to say the others are as well, but due to structural issues and last minute cracking I did place thin dowel rods through parts of them. I began working on the vehicles and other decorations about a week before the party. My favorite tool in the world for creating fondant characters or decorations is an old fashioned exacto knife and small/thin extendable box cutter!!! I basically started with a ball of colored fondant and carved away to create the machines. Then I added little details like the steps and wheels and faces. I used an edible icing marker to make the black dots for the machines eyes, and I also used that marker to make the stripes on Pilchard the cat and Bob and Wendy's faces.

The actual cake (the house) gave me some trouble. This is only the second cake I have ever draped in fondant and I find that process very difficult and frustrating!!! I have definately not mastered that technique by any means. I refrigerated my cakes and then cut them to size and iced them while they were still cool. By the time I finished assembling the shape of the house, the cakes were still fairly cool but had warmed up to some degree. Then I placed the fondant over the cake.... The humidity and heat outside right now caused my cake to droop witin the hour, and through the fondant you can see every layer of my cake, so the outside of the house had a "rippled" effect instead of the smooth professional look I was hoping for. (The last cake I draped in fondant did the same thing!) I thought you weren't supposed to place fondant cakes in a fridge, but that seems like the only way I could avoid keeping my cake from warming up to room temp and sagging. (Any advice on how to get that perfectly smooth professional look would be so great!!!!).

Oh and forgot to mention but the hill to the right of the house with the "1" candle on it was actually the Smash Cake for my little guy to go go crazy with, which he loved it! It was mashed to pieces within seconds:) I just cut it out and I had placed a cardboard circle beneath it for support so that is what sat in front of him with the candle lit when everyone sang happy birthday..

The cake was entirely edible except for four wooden dowel rods placed vertically to help my cake stand up.

I hope everyone likes this cake!!! I have another birthday right around the corner (my other son turns 3 in the middle of September!!) so if you are into machines and tractor cakes then check back in late September and I will post pictures of my next project..... A Harvest Themed John Deere Combine and Tractor Combination harvesting crops in a field!!! I'm going to attempt to cover the machines in fondant again so wish me luck!!!!!!!! Thanks for looking everyone, have a great day:)