Tractor & Truck Cakes
and other wheeled objects …
A favorite among pre-school aged kids, the tractor cake has many forms. Kids want individual cupcakes with tractors on top, tractor shaped cakes, and tractors placed on top of cakes. Parents sometimes use the birthday as an opportunity to gift a toy tractor on the cake, and other times go with a fully edible cake. Crushed cookies are common as "dirt" for the tractor to be digging in. This post will show you a few different tractor cake styles. I'll give step by step instructions for one digger cake.Are you looking to host a tractor cake party? There are so many different cake and cupcake designs to consider! This post shows a digger on top of a 12 inch square cake. Cookie crumbs make the dirt and the digger is made from fondant. This cake is frosted with buttercream, but if you want a totally clean look you can cover your cake with fondant instead.
First bake your cake
Bake a 12 inch square cake. You'll need 16 cups of cake batter to fill a 12x2 inch square cake pan. This means that a cake recipe designed to fill two 9" round cake pans will fill one 12x2 inch square cake pan. If you want to make two 2" layers, plan to make two full recipes of cake.
Some tips
Use CUTTERS as much as possible. You can eyeball and hand cut everything if needed, but likely if you do much baking and decorating and look through your tools you'll have cutters to help you. For this cake I used a simple pasta cutter, a basic knife, round biscuit cutters, small circle cutters and flower cutters.
Materials
For this digger cake you'll need to have fondant in the following colors: black, white, yellow and gray. You'll also need a recipe or two of frosting. You'll tint that frosting light blue and dark blue, leaving some of it white for filling and crumb coating.
The pictures below show you the step by step cutting out for the digger. Once you have your digger formed you can place it on top of your buttercream frosted or fondant covered cake. If you are using crushed up cookie crumbs for dirt place them on the cake before you pipe the borders.