Fireman Sam Cake
Action stations everybody! I am not well versed in Fireman Sam lingo, but I’m reliably informed (read: Wikipedia) that this is one of his well known catchphrases. I recently made a Fireman Sam birthday cake for a friend, this was the first novelty cake I’ve attempted and I’m pretty pleased with the result!
I started by making the sugarpaste Fireman Sam, in hindsight, it’s probably best to leave this until after the cake has been baked and stacked so you have an idea of how tall you need to make the figure. I found an extremely useful tutorial, with a step-by-step photo guide.
Top tip: make the legs a little longer than you intend for it to be, when standing, the rest of the sugarpaste that makes up the torso and head will be heavy and the weight will push down onto the legs/feet. I had this problem, so ended up having to extend his legs and feet enough to hold the weight!
I ended up storing Fireman Sam flat in my fridge for a while, so that he hardened up, meaning he could stand without crushing the legs and feet.
In terms of the cake, I baked two layers of a 10″ square vanilla sponge and cut it in half to form four rectangles. Luckily, a fire engine is a relatively simple shape to make out of cake – three rectangles stacked on top of each other with an additional square, made from the off cuts to form the front part of the fire engine.
I decided I wanted the windows to look more realistic than just stuck on top of the fire engine, so I covered the front of the cake with the blue ‘window’ sugarpaste before covering the entire cake with red sugarpaste. Once this was on, I cut out the shapes of the windows and hid the slightly messy edges with some black sugarpaste.
The rest of the cake was pretty simple to make, following a googled image of the fire engine, I tried to make the details as similar to the cartoon as possible. It’s definitely a good idea to make these little bits before stacking and covering the cake – it gives it time to harden up in the fridge and makes it much easier to handle afterwards.
All in all, I’m pretty pleased with how this cake turned out!
