Football Cake

My husband's birthday is today. Last year he requested a Redskins cake for this birthday, and for close to a year I planned to make a wonderful design I found on Flickr. As the date approached, I started searching for other helmet cakes, and noticed that even experienced decorators seemed to have difficulty getting the helmet shape correct. I love carved cakes, but I have never done one before. So I decided I needed to start with something a little smaller, and went with a football instead.

I tried two new techniques for his football cake, carving and chocolate plastic (recipe posted

below). I thought the chocolate plastic would be great alternative to fondant. It was pretty easy to roll out, but I misread the directions and mine was not quite flexible enough. That means that I had trouble filling in all the little cracks so my finish is pretty amatuer looking.

Chocolate plastic is a little chewy, much like fondant, but the flavor is better. It is also expensive compared to fondant. I am going to try it again, possibly with white chocolate.

Steps for a carved football cake:

1: Bake a cake, I made a Peanut Butter cake with crushed oreo cookies (click for recipe). I

baked mine in oval shaped pans, but any shape will do since you will be cutting the shape out anyway.

2: Torte the cakes and ice between each layer with buttercream icing

3: Freeze the cake. I froze mine for about 2 hours, but you could do this overnight.

4: Determine the dimentions of the cake if you are not making it lifesize. My real football was 6" wide and 10" long. 6 divided by 10 equals 0.6. My oval pan was 4.5" wide so, I took 4.5 divided by 0.6 and got 7.5 inches, that is how long I wanted my final cake to be.

5: Using a serated knife, I began carving the cake. First I did a rough cut of the shape, and then I fine tuned it. Search on You Tube for cake carving if you need some ideas how to do this.

6. I iced my carved cake with a thin layer of buttercream.

7. I rolled out my chocolate plastic as thinnly as possible and then draped it over my football shape.

8: I trimmed off the extra chocolate and then began smoothing it into place.

9. I used white chocolate to make the laces, if I do this cake again I will use fondant or gumpaste, the white chocolate didn't look realistic enough.

10: To finish is up, I used a grass tip (Marpol 333) and I used the frozen buttercream method to make the Redskins logo, a cursive R, and the number 31, the age my husband turned.

Overall I am happy with the way the cake turned out. I wanted the chocolate finish to be smoother, but making the recipe wrong led to that mistake. I know for next time now.

Matt loved the cake, and that is the important thing.  Happy Birthday!