Tractor Trailer Tire

Around the beginning of February, I did a birthday cake for my cousin's son.  He wanted a John Deere Cake, and the idea I came up with was to do a huge tractor tire.  He loved the idea, so that's what I did.


I started out by baking two 14" cakes, since I wanted to make sure there was plenty of cake for the party. I leveled, torted, filled and stacked the cakes.  Then took a bread knife and started cutting away on the outside of the cake to make a tire shape.  I then attacked the center (with a smaller knife) to cut out the middle.

Then I frosted the cake with whipped buttercream, and rolled out black fondant to cover it with.  Covering a cake (with a hole in it!) with fondant is no easy feat.  I finished putting the fondant on and smoothing it, only to see it starting to rip in the center where the hole was.  So, I took an exacto knife and made slits in the fondant so it was lay flat along the inside of the tire.  I figured I'd find something to cover it with later.  I then took a dogbone gumpaste tool and made tire tread marks on the sides of the cake, as a tire has.  I looked at the pictures I had of John Deere tires, and they have a yellow center to them.  Perfect!!  I rolled out some yellow fondant, cut a circle put it on the inside, covering up my ripping black fondant.  I also piped a star edge around the yellow to neaten it up.

I had also purchased some John Deere hot wheels-type cars to put on the cake, since the birthday boy wanted a construction site.  He described the construction site as "having lots of dirt and rocks", so that's what he got!  The piles of dirt are mounds of frosting covered in home-made "dirt" (graham cracker, brown sugar, white sugar, pepper, nilla wafers and cocoa powder all ground up).  The rocks are chocolate rocks I bought somewhere (no idea where, lol).  I used piping gel to get the rocks to stay in the trucks, and frosting for the piles of dirt in the trucks.

Here's a close up of the trucks:

 

The birthday boy was extremely happy with his cake!