Anatomy of a Birthday Cake

So tomorrow we are having Ronan's birthday party.  So I took today off to deal with all the stuff and make his cake.  Good thing too as it took me all freaking day!

My first thought was to make a Thomas the Train cake.  I soon found out that is much easier said than done.

I have a cool train cake pan so I thought I'd add some blue food color to white cake and viola I'd have a Thomas.  Well....first try was too purple

2nd try came out better

 (not that the lighting is so great you can really tell the difference! HA)
Anyway

Batter looks pretty close!

Time to bake

errrr its green.  So I spent about an hour and a half painstakingly shaving off the outer crust so the blue would show through.  Yeesh!

As you can see I gave up on trying to futher make the blue train look like Thomas as its soo small and I'm just not that good a decorator!  But its cute all the same I think.

I'm sure Ronan won't give two hoots but I had to at least try.