Thomas the Train Cake

This is the last cake of our family Cake Week (the week of my birthday, my son's birthday, and my mother's birthday, plus up to two weekends on either side, wherein I tend to bake a LOT of cakes). Today we had a small kids birthday party for my son.  He requested a Thomas the Train cake.

I admit that I'm not the best cake decorator and I have a silly problem of preferring taste over appearance when it comes to food. These little train cupcakes might work really well with rolled fondant, but I'm not a fan of how the packaged stuff tastes (maybe someday I'll try making my own). I used a basic decorating frosting (shortening, butter, vanilla, powdered sugar).The dark brown frosting is chocolate leftover from the cupcakes I sent to preschool on his actual birthday.

This is actually the second Thomas cake I've made for him with this cake pan. I bought the a few years ago at a local small kitchen store. I think this is the same one on Amazon. There are other, Thomas-branded cake pans available too. Maybe next Christmas I will try using this pan with a gingerbread recipe and decorating the cars with candy...

If you don't over-fill the train cars, each one holds about one to one-and-a-half cupcakes worth of batter.  I, of course, overfilled the pan so we had to trim the bottoms of each of the train cars to make them stand up flat. I had enough batter left for half a dozen normal cupcakes, though had I not over-done the train I would have had nearly a dozen.

Also, for this cake I used a regular boxed Pillsbury cake mix, but I think the pan would work really well with a heavier poundcake or bundt cake recipe. The normal cake is tasty, but the detail on the cars is lost. Then again, the details on the cars is lost as soon as I slather it with frosting :)