American Baker in Germany

This cake was for a little boy my youngest daughter's age who was turning two. What does he love? Pirates and trains. I was recently gifted a train cake form, so I decided to put it to good use for this little boy. The party was small. Just our family and theirs. I baked half a recipe of my vegan chocolate cake in the train baking pan. It was just barely enough. I wished I had made a bit more batter, but it worked out.  I used "goop" to grease the pan out of equal amounts of shortening, oil and flour and the cake just slid right out of the form without sticking at all. I leveled it really carefully.  I smeared a whole bunch of buttercream on the cake base and put the train on it. Then I noticed that it didn't quite fit inside the circle. I trimmed a bit off the left hand side to help it fit better.  I crumb coated it with peanut butter buttercream.  Then I split the last of my buttercream between four bowls. Some had more and some had less in them. ...

If you've never heard of Karneval, it's a festival celebrated in many countries, including Germany, where everyone dresses up in funny costumes and attends a huge parade with loud, festive music where the people in the parade throw candy at the crowd. Every year we get a lot of candy and this year was no exception. I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to make a Candyland cake. We've been talking about it for ages, so the time was ripe. First off, legal blah blah: This post was neither sponsored nor affiliated with Hasbro. Design used with permission. I started out by baking one recipe of my vanilla cake which I turned into funfetti cake and baked in a ten inch square cake pan. Then I layered it into two layers, which I then laid on a baking sheet next to each other. I even trimmed off a strip of cake from both of them so they would fit flush against each other. Then I frosted the cake with vanilla American buttercream. I couldn't chill it because the cake...