A cake to make my birthday boy happy

This year's cake for Austin's birthday ended up very similar to last year's cake -- by request. Austin specifically asked for a Lightning McQueen cake with the number 6 on it...sound familiar?

So to make it a little different than last year -- and to avoid having way too much cake like we did last year -- I decided to use the icing to make the number 6. It was a good idea, but in the end, was actually a lot harder to do cleanly than last year's laying of a number 5 on top of a sheet cake.

First, I iced the cake all in blue -- which I learned from last year is the crumb coat. I think my icing was too thick because it wasn't easy to do.

Next, I iced a large rectangle in chocolate icing and then outlined the number 6 with white icing and filled in the 6 with Oreo cookie crumbs. (To look like the road of course!)

Next came another coat of blue icing. This was the tricky part because I had to 'cut' the icing in around the chocolate icing 6 and blue doesn't easily spread on top of chocolate brown! (So, if you're keeping track, that's three coat's of icing in some places. In case it isn't obvious, my technique to icing a cake is to keep putting more icing on until it looks more or less the way I want.)

And for the finishing touches -- a handful of cars from Cars, Austin's favourite movie and characters.

Me, the perfectionist, will say that it wasn't my most beautiful cake. But Austin loved it, and that's all that matters.