Girly Car Cake

Who says cars aren’t for girls ? Gender stereotyping often irritates me . Why is it that cars and guns are only for boys whereas dolls and kitchen sets have to be for girls ? Don’t males cook and females drive ( that’s another story that most male drivers often accuse women of being lousy drivers) ? My girls had chosen a Barbie remote controlled car as one of their Eid gifts but alas the gender stereotyping had to play a role and it was bright pink . As far as the pink theme goes I must admit I too end up making pink cakes for my girls most of the time. Well, I guess sometimes stereotyping looks cute, doesn’t it?

Anyways, for my little one’s fifth birthday ( which means she is not so little anymore) I made a hurried car cake ( and yes, it was pink again) . I returned from my vacation in India almost two weeks ago but it seems that I haven’t settled down yet. With all the jet lag, extreme weather conditions ( temperatures touching -35 degrees C here ), unpacking, pending schoolwork etc. I didn’t have time to plan an elaborate cake. The Barbie car that my girls own gave me the idea to use the Wilton 3-D Cruiser Pan to make a car cake. I soon found out that easy decorating instructions for a girly car cake were already available on the Wilton website under the title ‘Flower Horsepower Cake” which made my task even simpler. Thankfully, there are others too who think cars are not just for boys.

The only problem I faced with this cake was that I ended up with a slightly harder crust than I would have liked. The instructions accompanying the Wilton 3D Cruiser Car pan said to use pound cake batter and bake the cake for 50-60 minutes. In another place on the Wilton website ( Flower Horsepower cake instructions) I found instructions to bake the pound cake batter for 1 hour and forty minutes. I have made 3D cakes in the past using Wilton pans and have successfully used vanilla layer cake batter instead of pound cake and did the same this time. However, my vanilla cake which usually takes 30-35 minutes in two 9 inch pans was still wet in the centre at the end of one hour whereas the top was already brown. I then covered the pan loosely with buttered foil and baked for another 20 minutes till done as I had read in the instructions for pound cake in the Cake Bible. I also lowered the temperature to 325 degrees C after an hour. Even with that I ended up with a slightly hard and overbrowned crust ( both top and bottom) but thankfully the inner part was soft and moist. The bottom crust was remedied as I sliced it to make it even but I could not do anything about the top part as that would spoil the shape of the car. Also, a small part of the cake stuck to the pan but that didn’t bother me since it was easy to salvage and stick to the cake with some frosting.

Even with all the flaws , what counts was that my girls and I had fun baking and decorating this cake . Here’s a pic of the birthday girl helping me to make the cake .