A friend of my brothers asked me to make a cake for her husband for his birthday next month. I guess he is really "into" his car and she wanted me to make a cake to resemble it. So, my question is this. I have never done a car or a sculpted cake for that mater. So do I buy the lightening McQueen car pan and try to modify it to look like a honda civic or do you think it would be eaiser to just make a sheet cake and carve one out of that? I'm still really new at cake decorating and my own worst critic. I told her that I wasn't sure if I was up to that level yet and that I would try a practice run at it first to see how that one went before I commited to making the real one. Any advice you expert CC decorators have for me would be greatly appreciated!

I think that 3D cruiser pan would be better than lightening McQueen car pan.If you bake a cake in 3D cake pan it would be much easier to get wanted shape of the car than if you stacked a sheet cakes and tries to carve from them.

I have no idea if this will actually help or not, but I thought it might help to get the ideas flowing...
http://www.bettycrocker.com/Recipes/Recipe.aspx?recipeId=33206

Lejla that is actually the pan I was thinking of. Not sure why I called it the lightening mcqueen pan. Perhaps because I've seen so may people use it for that.

Chen thanks for the link. I'll be sure to check it out.

Just a suggestion to see if you're comfortable with sculpting - try it on a block of Styrofoam. For a Honda Civic - I would have a piece about the size of half a loaf of bread. It's easier if you can print a "cake size" copy of a picture of the car, then you just trace the shape on the sides and follow the lines. The devil is always in the details - but it's usually impressive enough to just get the shape right. One other thing on carving - if you want to try it out on cake - freeze the cake for a bit to make it easier to work with. HTH