Choo Choo birthday cake

Here's a photo of the train cake I made for my son's 2nd birthday.

The cake was pretty easy to make--I hunted around online to find recipes and sort of cobbled together this design.

I used 3 chocolate cake mixes (betty crocker) for the train cars. I baked 3 large loaves in greased and floured bread pans, increasing the cooking time to 50 minutes. I also had enough batter to cook a cylinder for the engine. I used a bean can, paper removed and thoroughly washed, greased and floured. I filled the can 3/4 full with batter, placed it upright in another pan to catch any overflow and baked for 40 minutes. Once the can had cooled slightly, I used a can opener to cut the bottom of the can and the cake slid out easily.

I cut the loaves into cars and frosted them with tinted canned cream-cheese style frosting. The wheels are 1/2 of an oreo, stuck into the frosting. The smokestack is 3 oreos stacked and frosted. The headlight is half an oreo with white frosting. The coal car has piroline cookies to create the edge and heaped up m&ms for the coal. The tracks are black licorice and chocolate covered wafer cookies for the trestles. The "gravel" is crushed oreos.

My son went crazy! He loved it! It was easy to cook, and the assembly was lots of fun. I made it the night before and it was still good the next day.