Need to make an Engine (Thomas) birthday cake for 4 yr old daughter - any recipes/ideas?

[ClaudiaSchiffer]

Hi there, my dd1 is 4 on Sunday and is train mad, for the last 2 birthdays she has wanted a train cake - we have had Thomas and last year, James. I have made the engine itself out of swiss roll and sponge then iced it. I kind of want to do something a bit different this year - has anyone got any ideas?

She loves all the Thomas trains, I was maybe thinking about a train in a landscape (God that sounds ambitious!).

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You could make a cake and ice it in plain white and then use coloured icing for whatever sort of picture you want on the top. I did this for ds2's 2nd birthday with a picture from the cbeebies website which I turned into a cardboard template, and then mixed more of the icing with food colouring to make the various parts of the character. You could also do a landscape by making the icing on the cake green (for fields) and then ice a track across the top, then using some more ready to roll icing, colour it and make it into a train and carriages (would be easy to do as just like plasticine).

oo thanks bagpuss, great idea for the green cake + icing train - is it easy to mix the colour in to ready made icing do you know?

I did with some white but you can also buy ready coloured icing (supercook I think) which had a guide on the back for mixing certain colours using the ones in the pack. Ds2's cake is the pic on my profile if it's still there - put it on when I made it so rather old!

Have you seen the train cake tins in Lakeland?