"Dad Gum!"

I could not be happier about how this little cake turned out for my son's 3rd birthday! Mater was a big hit - for my 3 year old and all his grandparents! One nice thing about a Mater cake is it doesn't have to be perfect because, Mater is, shall we say, a little rough around the edges...


Sorry, no step-by-step pictures. But here's the gist of how I made it:

I baked a cake (I actually ended up using 2 cake mixes because the 1st cake was so crumbly, but you should be able to do it with one cake mix) in 3 bread pans. Just divide the batter evenly between the three pans. Remove from pans after cooling for about 10 minutes and let cool completely before assembling & decorating. Once cooled, I stacked 2 of the 3 for the main (largest) part of the cake (just using a thin layer of chocolate frosting as the filling). I cut the 3rd cake into three even sections and stacked 2 sections together for the cab. I frosted the whole thing with chocolate frosting and then used:

1. marshmallow fondant to make the whites of the eyes & the buck teeth (there are several great tutorials available online if you just do a google search).
2. a smooshed mini marshmallow for the headlight (poke it into the frosting on the other side first where Mater has a broken headlight)
3. small chocolate donuts ("donettes") for the wheels
4. kit kat bar cut in half and put on 2 toothpicks for the side view mirrors
5. another kit kat bar for part of the engine
6. a reeses peanut butter cup for the round part of the engine
7. large googly eyes (put a dab of frosting on the back to stick them onto the fondant)
8. a clothes pin for the tow
9. a shoelace for the tow cable (I promise it was a new, un-used lace)
10. crumbles up graham crackers for the "dirt road" (spread a thin layer of frosting over your plate/dish holding the cake and sprinkle cracker crumbs over the frosting to look like dirt)



Quite Simple and pretty darn cute... "Dad gum!" that's my kind of project!