Mario Kart has been a favorite game for our whole family.  For my oldest son’s 7th birthday, he wanted a Mario Kart party.  My husband worked hard on this party, making it a very memorable one for Jacob.  He set up a Mario Kart Wii gaming center in our garage so that Jacob and his friends could race on huge screens.

The cake and decorations were my department.  I made a simple happy birthday banner out of blue and red card stock and letters printed off of the computer.  I drew Mario in his cart on a piece of poster board and colored it with markers.  You could also project an image onto your poster board if you don’t want to draw it free hand.

For the cake, I baked two 8 inch cakes and placed them side by side on a piece of white foam core board.  This provided a sturdy foundation for decorating and displaying a figure 8 racetrack.  The best way to color your frosting black, without using too much food coloring, is to use dark chocolate icing and add a small amount of black food coloring until you have reached your desired color.  I used Wilton’s gel icing color in black.  The lines in the road are cut rectangles of white Air Heads candy.  You could get a similar look using white frosting or fondant. The “sand” lining the race track is made of graham cracker crumbs, which can be found in the baking section of any grocery store.  Next, I tinted white frosting green, using Wilton’s gel icing color in leaf green.  The grass look was very easy to achieve by using Wilton’s #233 multi-opening decorating tip.  The Mario Kart banner, mushroom, star, cloud, and turtle shell are just pictures printed off the internet and glued to toothpicks.  A thick black and white checkered strip of ribbon wrapped around the cake gave the edges a clean look.  The finishing touch was placing the Mario Kart mini figures (purchased online) around the figure 8 race track.  This cake was almost too cute to eat!