Australian Women's Weekly Train Cake

Apr 17, 20233 min read

Updated: Apr 1, 2024

Tips I learnt from making the famous train cake

Okay, so this was the first 'good' cake I ever made. This was for my sons first birthday who is now 4. I wanted to make this cake, not knowing anything much about baking. I wish I took photos of the stages but here are some tips I pass on from my experience. I am an absolute amateur, so this is just sharing information from my experience.

I actually did a trial run of the cake as I didn't want to have a failure for my first big effort into a cake for my first child's birthday. Here are some handy tips!

1. Prepare and bake the cakes in advance - This saves a lot of time and saves a lot of stress. I can't recall the recipe I used for the cake and I think I bought a pre-made cake roll from the shops for the round part of the train at the front. Find all the decorations you want with plenty of time prior as I did find it hard to find some specific things such as the licorice rolls. I eventually found them in a cheap shop as the local grocery store only sold licorice pieces, not the long roll.

2. Freeze the cake - I didn't do this in my run through and it was terrible to ice. After baking and cooling down, I wrapped each part of the train separately twice with cling wrap and once with foil. I labelled all the parts of the train so I could pull them out part by part to assemble and ice.

3. Decorate the day prior - I now decorate all of my kids cakes the night before as I always run out of time trying to do everything on the day. I still ran out of time for this cake so had to improvise. I would have liked to have done the train tracks if I had time. My chimney also didn't look how I wanted it to so I put the number one candle there instead. It gets very messy to decorate on the plate you plan to serve on so keep that in mind. You could use a spatula to move onto another serving plate which I do sometimes with other cakes.

Confectionary I used:

- All the black lines I used licorice rolls and cut them to make them thinner, I found this the easiest way to do all the black parts shown.

- For the wheels I used Arnotts chocolate mint slice biscuits.

I used smarties for all the coloured dotes you see.

I purchased coloured popcorn for on top of the carriages.

I used chocolate sprinkles for under the train

Overall, there isn't many items to purchase for decorating, it's just ensuring you can find them all in time.

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