Photo: Simon Wicks / Flickr

Making a train cake for a children’s party is a lot of fun and shouldn’t take much longer than an hour if all your ingredients are ready. You’ll need two small loaf cakes, a Swiss roll, melted chocolate, wafer biscuits, icing sugar, round chocolate biscuits, some smooth apricot jam and a medium-sized candle. Once you’ve assembled the cake, you could arrange some brightly covered shoe boxes to represent the trucks, which can be lined up behind the engine cake.

Ingredients

Arrange for the following ingredients before you begin constructing your train cake: 2 small loaf cakes (preferably made with a butter cake mixture), a Swiss roll, some smooth apricot jam, 850 grams of melted chocolate, wafer biscuits (these are to be halved to represent train windows), icing sugar, a large candle (to represent the chimney) and some round chocolate biscuits (for the wheels).

You will also need some small candles to represent the number of birthday years.

Assemble the front and back

Smooth some apricot jam over the top of one of the loaf cakes. Place the other loaf cake on top of this so that the cakes are joined together vertically. Use some more apricot jam to join the sandwiched loaf cakes to the Swiss roll. Coat the train engine with the melted chocolate.

Position the windows, chimney and wheels

To make the windows for the engine driver’s cabin, halve the wafer biscuits and position them onto the soft chocolate. If the chocolate is dry, use some icing sugar ‘glue’ to embed them. Simply mix a small amount of icing sugar with some water to make a ‘glue’ paste.

Use the round chocolate biscuits to create wheels on the train’s engine. Then insert the candle into the engine to create a chimney. This candle-chimney will be especially effective once it is lit.

Optional trucks

Position a row of covered shoe boxes behind the train’s engine to represent the trucks. Fill them up with sweets and other treats for the children. Use some icing sugar ‘glue’ to fix round chocolate biscuit wheels to the trucks.

Tags: baking, cake, cake recipes