Are you ready for some football???
KJ, my cousins kid or my second cousin, turned 8 last Thursday. For his pool party, he requested two football themed cakes: one for a party with kids from school and soccer and one for family friends and relatives.
The football shaped cake below was baked in a football shaped pan. It is chocolate cake that is filled and frosted with swiss merengue buttercream and covered in chocolate fondant. To give the football texture, I imprinted it using a plastic needlework sheet after rolling out the fondant. The football laces as well as the number 8’s are made of vanilla fondant. The green grass is tinted cream cheese frosting. I thought that there would be tons of this cake leftover. Obviously, I underestimated the cake eating power of a bunch of 8 year old boys! They tore the cake up and a lot of them even came back for seconds. I am amazed at the contrast between the dainty pieces of cake that adults typically eat and the huge quantities that kids can eat. Obviously kids know the secret to appreciating a cake baker: The more of the cake that disappears, the better it is!! I’ll bake cake for kids parties any day!
KJ, being the lucky boy that he is, actually had 2 parties in the same day. The cake below is an 8″ lemon cake with lemon curd filling and lemon swiss merengue buttercream frosting. The football decorations are made of chocolate fondant while the other decor is vanilla fondant. The Bears logo is on top of the cake. I made the logo as follows: I first cut out a 6″ circle of blue colored fondant and attached it to the cake. To add a sparkle element (though the pictures do not give the sparkle proper justice – if anyone has ideas on how to photograph sparkle, I’d love to hear them!), I painted the round with a mixture of sparkle dust and vodka (don’t worry, the vodka evaporates as the round dries). I then cut out the white and orange C’s and adhered them to the blue.
You can click either picture above and it will take you to a page with more detail pictures. Every time I decorate a cake, I learn something new. Friday and Saturday were really quite humid days in Kzoo. When I put the fondant on the very cold (refrigerated cakes), it would begin to sweat within just a few minutes. I had to work quickly with smoothing and getting it in just the right place. This was good and bad, I suppose. It did make the fondant very shiny without me having to trick it into being shiny with the steamer, but it did not leave much room for error.
Cakes on deck: Pirate themed Lego cake for Tuesday and Megan’s 1 year old tiered cake w/ remnants of Mickey Mouse for Saturday. I have an order for mini lemon cakes for Saturday (see next post), and some kind of cake desert for Sunday, too. With all of this business, it really is utopia at Cake Utopia!
Cake Utopia 