About-face!

Drill Sergeant: Gump! What's your sole purpose in this Army?
Forrest: To do whatever you tell me, Drill Sergeant!

I love that movie and I love the acting of Tom Hanks as Forrest, Forrest Gump. Another good friend left for the army last week and in honor of him leaving, I baked a special cake. It is a little boy's dream come true - an army tank! Although my friend is not a little boy, I hope he liked it anyways.

It was really fun making this cake, and I can see how cake decorators must have so much fun designing their creations. I used 2 box cakes for the whole thing, chocolate and yellow. Originally, I wanted just the cupcakes to be chocolate, but I had so much chocolate batter left over that I just swirled it into the yellow cake. So first things first, the tank....

Bake the cake according to the directions on the box using a 13x9 pan. You're going to cut the final COOLED cake about 1/3 of the way in. Look below.




Next, you're going to cut the smaller 1/3 section into a square so that it can be places on top of the bigger piece of cake. You're going to need to cut the bottom cake so that it looks like the bottom part of a tank. Just play around with it. Now, you need to frost the bottom section first. Somehow, I played around with my food coloring and vanilla frosting to get this dirt colored/greenish looking frosting that reminded me of the army colors.



Frost the bigger cake, then place the smaller 1/3 section on top and frost. Now's the fun part. Grab a few oreos and split them in half. These are going to be the "wheels" of the tank. I bought some pirouettes, cut them into thirds, and placed them around the wheels. You can pretty much use any treat/cookie as long as it looks the part. Have fun!