Motorbike cake

One of my goals this year was to bake more often and I’ve been trying my hand at novelty cakes recently. My first attempt was a snooker table cake for my friends birthday, followed by a penguin design for Christmas last year. Both were simple sponge cake recipes with fondant decorations.

The motorbike cake (shown below) was made for Artur’s birthday back in May and is my latest novelty cake. Although I cheated a little and bought the edible motorbike decoration after a few failed attempts at assembling my own! But I’m hoping to work on my fondant decorations for future novelty cakes.

The cake itself was a chocolate sponge (his favourite), covered in white rolling icing that I painted green and black with food colouring.

For the motorbike cake, you will need:

170g unsalted butter, softened, not melted
170g caster sugar
115g self-raising flour
3 eggs
55g cocoa powder
White rolling icing
Green food colouring
Black food colouring
Fondant decorations
Confectioners sugar
Water

Method

Preheat the oven to 190c/170c fan or gas mark 5.

Put the butter and sugar into a bowl and mix until creamy and lighter in colour.

Sieve the cocoa and flour into a bowl and add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

Spoon the mixture into the tin and spread using a knife.

Put into the oven and bake for 25 minutes until springy to touch.

Remove from the oven and leave to stand for 5 minutes before turning out on to a cooling rack.

Roll out the white icing until there’s enough to cover the cake.

Fix to the cake using icing (mix of confectioners sugar and water).

Paint the icing with green and black food colouring for the road and grass, and add the fondant decorations as shown in the photo.

The hardest parts were covering the icing and making it smooth, and painting the colours. Next time, I’ll probably use coloured rolling icing for something like this.

Have you ever tried decorating novelty cakes?