Table Saw Cake

We had a family reunion over the weekend and my husbands uncles birthday happened to be on the same weekend as the reunion. He has had his thunder stolen a couple times so my awesome in-laws thought a cake for him would be a fun way to make it up to him. They asked me to make him a birthday cake that would be able to feed everyone at the reunion. He is a shop teacher and very handy with wood working so we went with a Tool theme.

What you'll need:
Cake
Frosting (black, yellow and grey)
Silver Sprinkles
Chocolate
Wood Graining Tool
Saw Blade
Graham Crackers
Sugar Sheet (or fondant)
Food Markers

BUILDING:

Baking Trick

First I want to share a cool trick I learned from an awesome baker friend! I borrowed this half sheet pan and had never baked a cake that massive in size (look it barely fit in my oven). When she brought her pan over she also brought some rose nails and said to put them flat side down in the pan when I bake it. It makes it bake evenly and keeps it from doming quite as bad. It totally worked! Oh and if you've never baked a half sheet cake before let me warn you it takes A LOT of batter! This was 4 batches of the recipe I used to get it half full!

Now for the actual building. This is super simple because there isn't a lot of shaping. It is all square or rectangle shapes so I just baked in pans that were the sizes I needed. Use a rectangle (whatever size you'd like) for the base (the table). Then bake another cake in a loaf pan (this will be your plank of wood). Then bake either a second smaller loaf pan (for the tape measure) or cut off the end of the first loaf pan (if your plank doesn't need to be as long as the loaf) and use the end for the tape measure.
Side note: I used marble cake for everything so that it would have kind of a grain inside when it was cut.

FROSTING:

Frosting

The table part of the table saw is the big rectangle cake. I frosted the whole thing in grey buttercream frosting then added some silver sprinkles to give it more of a chrome look. The wood was frosted in peanut butter frosting (one of my faves! So delish!) because it was kind of tan wood color. The tape measure was frosted just using a star tip and I pulled out my husbands tape measure to copy the color and pattern. Pretty simple since most of it is just spreading rather than piping with a tip.

DETAILS:

Wood Grain Detail

Saw Blade and Tape Measure added

I LOVE this new trick I learned and want to make another cake using it so bad! I got a wood graining tool at Home Depot for like $3.00. Then melted chocolate and used the tool to spread the chocolate on wax paper. Put it in the freezer but only for about 3-5 minutes (other wise it curls and breaks more easily). Then you lay the chocolate on the frosting and peel off the wax paper! This made the cake so much cuter! Plus who doesn't love chocolate?? (besides me haha). You can see the seams on the edges so I'm dying to try again and work on doing that better.
Then I put the saw blade in (it's real...after figuring out the wood grain my creative juices were all dried up...) and added the crushed up graham cracker crumbs for the saw dust effect.
Lastly I put the tape measure on. I used a sugar sheet for the measuring part and wrote the numbers on with a food marker. I also added the Dewalt logo to the blade and the tape measure by also writing on a sugar sheet (Doesn't look anything like the real logo...but you get the idea).
It was a hit!

Finished Table Saw Cake