How to Build a Train Cake

My son has been asking me if we can “build” a cake all week. When I asked him what kind of cake he wanted to build, he said “Ummmm…a TRAIN cake!”

Since there’s pretty much nothing on earth I’d rather do than share my most favorite hobby with my sweet boy, we got to work right away. But I first had to give some thought to exactly HOW we were going to build a train out of cake. I debated a sculpted 3-D masterpiece, or cutting a sheet cake into the shape of a train, or even ordering a train shaped pan, but I wanted to keep it super simple so that he could participate as much as possible.

So I decided to do a pull-apart cupcake train. I’ve not done pull-apart cupcakes before, although I’ve seen some pretty cool ones. I did a quick search online and found an adorable template for a train and boxcar pull apart cupcake display. Bingo. I found it here at Celebrate Life Simple. She has dozens of adorable pull-apart cupcake templates for all occasions. I also had an image of a train from my son’s upcoming birthday party decorations, so I improvised a little with the design to come up with something unique.

Lukas asked his dad what flavor cupcakes he wanted and he said chocolate, so we whipped up a few chocolate box cake mixes. Then I made two batches of my go-to vanilla buttercream frosting and tinted some with red, blue, black, and yellow food coloring. I gathered the rest of the supplies we’d need: a cake board, icing bags, couplers, tips, and a spatula.

Then we got to work!

We baked the cupcakes and arranged them on our cake board. We frosted them in the four colors we made, and then my sweet boy added a few finishing touches.

This was such a fun and easy project for us, especially with the cold and rainy weather we’ve been having. My two-almost-three-year-old loved it, and now he’s asking when we can build another cake!