The teenager's bike/river/waterfall cake

Approximately 2 days before his 13th birthday, my oldest son informed me that he would like a mountain biking cake. 

 

Oh, and while I was at it, I should add a bridge in the trail, over a river with a kayaker in it, and a waterfall.

 

Apparently he's still in the "my mom can do anything" stage.

 

So, I did what I could. 

To make this cake, I used two 9 inch round cakes.  I placed one cake, curved size down, on the plate.  Then I leveled the 2nd cake, and put it cut-size down on top of the other.  To form the river, first I frosted the top of the cake blue.  Then I cut a channel from the scrap, and placed the two pieces on top of the cake.

The next step was frosting.  I used a basic buttercream recipe, tinting about half of it green and a little bit blue.  I added baking cocoa to about 1/3 of the frosting to create the brown for the path and rocks.

 

I completed the waterfall by frosting down the side of the cake with blue.  If you'd like to make yours a little more waterfall-ish, you can cut a wedge from cake scraps and glue it to the side of the cake to make the waterfall a little more cascading.

Next, I frosted the green parts, and finally I added the bike path.  To clean up the transition along the edge of the path, I piped a line of chocolate frosting along the sides.  I also piped chocolate frosting on the banks of the river, and used a wet finger to smooth it into place.

The bridge is, of course, 3 pretzel rods.  I added some chocolate frosting rocks to the river, which caused a little bit of whitewater (white glittery gel icing).  I also sprinkled some blue sugar into the river to add dimension.

We looked everywhere for a cake-sized bicycle.  Could not find one, so I put some melted chocolate into a plastic bag, cut off a corner, and piped a bike shape onto wax paper.

The bike was too fragile to peel off the wax paper, so I just stuck it, wax paper and all, to the side of the cake.  Once it was stuck, I was able to peel the wax paper off.

By the way, I found some cute little wire bicycle paperclips the very next day.

 

I didn't even bother trying to find a cake-sized kayak and kayaker.  But I did spend a good amount of time trying to decide if I thought I could make one out of...something.  Maybe if he'd given me three days...

 

After all of that, what really matters is: does it taste good? 

 

And the answer? Yes. 

These were the 10th & 12th birthday cakes.
The boy likes his waterfalls...