Tank Cake

Tank Cake - how to - sorta - :-)

Brooks asked for a tank cake, and really it scared me a little - I put off googling "how to make a tank cake" until last week. I had already decided I would make the inside camo. I got that idea off of Pinterest, using cupcakes, but I thought it would do fine for a cake. After a google search, I took a few ideas from each of the pictures I saw, until I had something that was workable. It had to be "artillery", which I now know just means it has a gun? Not really sure about that actually.

I used Betty Crockers gluten free cake mixes, one white, and one chocolate. I divided the white cake into 3 parts, equally, and used Wilton's food gel colour Juniper Green to dye 2 of them green, one lighter (using less dye), and one darker (using more dye). Then I mixed in a bit of the chocolate into the white batter, to make a tan colour. So the cake's flavour was marble - just in a different pattern:-)

Batter, dyed

Then I started blobbing the cake into the pan (9x13), one colour at a time, using a spoon. I had some chocolate left over and made a thin 9x9 of just chocolate.

Almost ready to bake

After baking, I split the 9x13 cake in half, and leveled.

leveling cakes

I used the extra chocolate cake batter (9x9 pan) to make the top part of the tank.

Cutting, trimming, and laying out.

Then I made my typical buttercream, in chocolate, so it was a nice light brown colour too, and tasted great of course:-) (I used 6T of cocoa powder per recipe, instead of the melted chocolate). This I put between the cakes, and also did the crumb coat. I needed a double recipe for this cake, but had some icing leftover.

Then I made marshmallow fondant, and used the Juniper Green dye, and Brown dye to make the same 4 colours again, light green, dark green, tan & brown.

I divided the 1 fondant recipe into 4 parts, and dyed them. This was plenty of fondant for this cake

To make a camo cover for my cake, I just rolled up the fondant and placed it together, and then I rolled it out, which blended them together perfectly. Since I was kind of making this up as I went (couldn't really find any great helps online) - I would do a few thing differently next time. #1, I'd put them a little closer together, overlapping just a bit, so I wouldn't get any gaps at all in the intersecting corners, which I ended up with in a few places. #2, I'd make the fondant pieces smaller, so I had a "tighter" camo look, the rolling reeeeeeally stretches those babies out big!

Covering the cake. If you look closer, you can see the spots (more by the edges), where there are gaps that did not close when rolling, though I tried.

You can see a few of the gaps - but the brown buttercream underneath helped it to blend right in

I did it again, for the top part - I realized I should have made them smaller by this point, but wanted the 2 halves to match, so I did it basically the same as I did before, but tried to place them tighter, so no/fewer gaps

Fondant for the top part of tank, ready to roll

I covered a pretzel rod (not gf) in fondant for the gun

I used Great Value brand Peanut Butter Fudge Cookie for the wheels (not gf)

I used chocolate (brown) licorice and cut it into small pieces for the "caterpillar" things that surround the tanks wheels. Yes, I realize I am not very technical with my terminology. And does it matter? Place this sucker in the forest and just see how many people will be able to spot it. Impervious to detection, all camo'd out.

#6 Tank, duh

Little Death is Brooks' screen name in World of Tanks. Brian's is Death Lives. And really, don't ask. I had nothing to do with the selection of these screen names, or they would have been WAY cooler, like Maverick and Goose or something, and not so awfully morbid.

When I am doing a cake - I am really not doing anything else. This was my kitchen upon cake completion. Yikes.

A last minute addition, Brooks thought it should say World of Tanks on it. Just in case we had any doubt where this tank belonged.

It was GOOD, actually. For a gluten free cake, people didn't even know until they were told. It was more pound cake-ish in density and texture, not light and airy as some cakes are, but it tasted great, and was super camo, inside and out!

So cute! I really like how it turned out!

Singing happy birthday to our 6 six year old boy!!