Happy Birthday Logan... and me!

I should be grateful - when I was sent into hospital for induction it actually ON my birthday.  Having been appraised that morning of the very considerable dangers of inducing after C-section I spent the whole day waiting for surgery and was then sent home for the weekend.  Logan was born on the Monday following after anothre long day of waiting at 6.10pm.

An earlier post spoke of my annual foray into kids birthday cakes.  Now it has of course become a bi-annual event.  Thank goodness we're not having any more kids because I'd definitely be pushed into diabetic status with the amount of icing I consume while I'm making them.  Even today, having suffered from two colds/virus type afllictions in a week and having nursed both Zoe and Logan through them last weekend my much reduced appetite has managed to make room for buttercream icing!

As promised today's adventure will not be an expensive chook food project but an actual edible cake.  At the point I write I have decorated the cake board - probably with more icing than I intend putting on the cake - and cut the tractor shape from the two banana cakes I previously baked and froze.  Limiting icing I'm not sandwiching them together with icing but might add a little jam between the layers - the wheels have three layers and the body of the tractor two.  I framed the top layer of the tractor cab to make a window and have already popped a little Playmobil driver in.

I've made up two colours of buttercream icing.  The black(ish) is for the wheels (I used some of it pre colouring for the mud on the cake board - you have to start with chocolate to get the black colour) and I've made a steel blue for the body of the tractor.  I wanted a red one (like Daddy's tractor) but the red was just not right - too pinkish and in trying to correct the colour I made a mess and in the end just dumped a whole lot of blue in it - never mind.

I'm heading into town a bit later to pick up the embellishments - oreo cookies for hubcaps, black jellybeans or licorice bullets for tyre tread and strap licorice that I can pull apart to "frame" the body pieces.  I'll probably pop up a photo tomorrow when it's lit and being eaten *fingers crossed*.

Edit....
Well it tasted good and I achieved my goal of making it without too much icing and thereby edible but I wasn't impressed with the outcome.  Not that it matters because Logan loved and sank his fingers into it first chance he got!!  We also had to light and relight the candles for him to blow out!!

Lesson learned - don't do this when you're tired.  I DID get licorice to "frame" it but never used it because I rushed it the morning of my birthday.  I was way too tired to do it the night before.  Of course the icing was hard and I didn't bother microwaving the first lot so it didn't layer on very well.  Also Logan was bugging me every step of the way and "into everything" little boys and grown up fatigue don't go so well together.