Trans Am...[I able to do this cake?!]

I was asked to make this Trans Am cake about 9 months ago. It haunted my dreams since then. HOW was I going to do a cake in the shape of a Trans AM?!!! Of course, in my usual way, when I was asked to do this cake I said, "SURE!" And THEN I panicked. Never done one quite like this before.

So many of you may be wondering why was this so difficult? Why did this cause so much stress? Well, it's because this cake was fashioned after someone's ACTUAL car. He loves his car so much, he had it professionally photographed, and I was to recreate HIS car with cake. No pressure or anything. (Acutally, I had a LOT of fun thinking about and planning this cake...really. ;)) It's a beautiful car, hey?

So I started out with this cake. Two 9X13 chocolate cakes filled with buttercream. This is a much firmer chocolate cake (see "Steve's Cake" post if you really need to understand why I didn't use THAT chocolate cake recipe). I needed a firm cake to do the carving necessary to transform this block into a car.

Many thanks to my husband who helped plan and carve this cake with me. You can see in the photo above, Danny actually got a pound cake to practice with before helping to carve the actual cake. What a great guy!

So, now it's beginning to kind of look like a car, right?

I crumb coated it and covered it with fondant. Then I etched in the car markings.

And then I added the final details so the car cake looked like this:

I dropped the car off yesterday and Tiffany, who ordered this cake for her fiance, was so excited! I was relieved. I hope her fiance had a great birthday! (I slept like a baby...)