Southern's 2nd Birthday Cake

This year, to go along with Southern's train-themed birthday party, I made him a train cake. I found a recipe in a cookbook at the library for a Christmas Train Cake made with 5 mini-loaf pans. I didn't have mini loaf pans, so I improvised with regular loaf pans and just made 3.

I cut one in half to make the engine and used the last one as the train car. This worked out nicely because I had an extra half loaf of birthday cake that I could send home with my dad for my Hahn grandparents who are home-bound and couldn't attend the party.

Then I iced the cake. I had originally wanted it to be red and blue, but I had a slight problem as I was mixing up the red icing. I used my new (found on clearance) food coloring. I grabbed the red bottle with red lid and started putting drops into the white icing. I stired. It came out pink. So I added more drops... and more drops... and more until that darn red bottle was almost empty. All the while stirring furiously. The icing just kept getting more and more pink until it was a shocking bright pink! So I then leaned over to read the food coloring box and find out that the colors it came with were blue, yellow, green, and pink. No red. Great. No wonder it was on clearance! I could just imagine Dustin's reaction to a pink and blue train cake for our son. Luckily, I had bought two jars of icing. Whew. The pink went into the trash and now I mixed up a nice light shade of yellow.

I then piped on blue icing to finish out the train details. I added Oreo's for wheels, a small piece of black licorice to connect the car to the engine, an ice cream cone smoke stack, and some cotton candy "steam". I also spelled out "Happy Birthday Southern" with candy letters. I think it turned out nicely for a kid's birthday cake, if I do say so myself. Definitely home-made, but made with love :)