Fire truck cake for Nicholas

The fire truck cupcakes were such a big hit, I thought I'd do a fire truck cake! Actually, was contacted by a friend of a friend to make a fire truck cake for her son Nicholas, who was turning 2. Nicholas has some food allergies - eggs, milk, nuts and even soy are no-nos, but butter, fortunately, was not.

Nicholas' mom gave me recipe she used to make muffins but had never tried as a cake. I modified it a bit (using butter instead of oil, upping the liquids) and it turned out pretty great (at least from the little crumbs that I was able to taste while putting it together).

All the decorations are made from gumpaste. I'm not a big fan of the alphabet cutters from Wilton, and have been using ones from Fox Run instead. These, called Tappits, are going to be my next purchase, I think, but I hear they're a little trickier to use than regular cutters.

The fire truck shape came from a Google search of fire truck coloring pages. I found one I liked the best, shrunk it on my copier and traced it on to a piece of gumpaste. Much better looking than freehand, especially when it's my hand doing the freehanding!

Update to Tess' Cupcakes

I've had this post saved for a while and finally have the info to finish it!

Tess' mom told me that her daughter recently was diagnosed with a peanut allergy. I told her I don't use nuts in my recipes but the fine print on a lot of chocolate says something along the lines of "made in a facility that processes nuts." I use Valrhona cocoa powder for my chocolate cake but the bulk box I had didn't say anything about it. I bought it from Chocosphere (best price around, and I looked everywhere), so I called and spoke with Jerry Kryszek, owner of the company. He thought it was safe, but to be sure contacted his Valrhona contact in the US. That person wasn't completely positive so was going to contact the main office in France. Since I didn't have a lot of time, and wasn't 100% sure it was nut-free, I used Hershey's cocoa, which was ok to use (at least from an allergy standpoint). I was happy to see that they still turned out pretty good, they were just missing that deep dark chocolate taste that makes Valhrona and other premium brands so special.

I got this email today from Jerry:
Hello Sara,

Good news! I just received the following from Valrhona yesterday:

"As I mentioned to you last week by phone re. your inquiry on the cocoa powder, I received the confirmation from the QC dept. that the Valrhona cocoa powder is free from peanuts and product thereof. I hope that your customer will be satisfied by this information. "

I hope this helps. Let me know if I can assist further in any way!

With very best regards,
Jerry

So there you have it. If you need great chocolate, great prices, and more importantly, great customer service - go to Chocosphere!