Kai's Soccer Ball Birthday Cake


Its time for another cake! I still owe this blog one entry on a baby shower cake we did in September. I don't have any pictures of it in part because the shower was at 4pm on the day that Michigan played Notre Dame at 3:30pm. So I was mainly concerned with getting the cake out of the house so I could watch football. Pictures were taken, but I don't have them yet.

This cake was for Kyle and Tricia's son Kai, who turned 1 year old on Saturday. The cake seemed to take us a long time, but that was mostly because it takes a long time to cook a 12" x 18" cake, it takes almost equally as long for the cake to cool and it takes a lot of space to make all of that possible (which means lots of stopping to clear space and clean). Other than that there isn't a whole lot of setup that you need to know. Enjoy the photos:

Here are the two halves of the soccer ball. Rice Krispy Treats were the base and a funfetti cake on the top. Both halves were formed using a soccer ball cake by Wilton.
We used buttercream to stick the two halves together, then draped it in white fondant.
Once the fondant was down Lauren lightly pressed the lines for the paneling and then used her stitching tool to complete the look.This was our original idea for the cake, but there was no good way to cover the 1 in a solid color. Fondant would have left ugly seams all over the place and nothing else would have been as smooth as fondant. I am sure we could have figured something out eventually, but we ended up abandoning the #1 in favor of a Happy Birthday placard.

The base cake is three layers. The first and third were a white buttermilk cake and the middle layer was a pumpkin spice cake. The layers were filled with a cream cheese frosting and the exterior was covered in buttercream. Everything was made from scratch, except for the half a soccer ball made from Funfetti.
A closeup of the finished soccer ball. Lauren did an awesome job making the Puma logo out of black fondant. The K is for Kai. It does not indicate that the cake is kosher.

The birthday boy and his cake.


From left to right: Kyle, Tricia, Lauren and I posing with the cake. You might notice the section of mostly missing cake to the right of the soccer ball. That plus most of the unseen back cake half of the soccer ball managed to feed everyone at the party. Lauren and I kind of eyeballed how much cake we needed. 13 x 9 seemed small, especially given the size of the soccer ball. So we got a 12" x 18" pan, but when we baked the first layer it seemed really thin. So we decided three layers would be better than two. It was only time constraints that stopped it from being 4 layers. Of course when we stacked it up the cake ended up being enormous. A catering website I looked up after the fact informed us that a 2 layer 12" x 18"cake serves 54 dessert sized portions. So I'm thinking this cake served roughly 81 from the bottom cake alone, plus another 10 or so out of the soccer ball.

Tricia, let me know how many new best friends you make from being the cake fairy this week.

2 comments:

Rach said...

Dude, the cake fairy stopped by my house and I proceeded to eat an ENTIRE plate of cake and make Sofia & Stella share a small piece. I ate cake till I was very ill...but it was worth it. Amazing job guys! But Sofia said she still likes hers the best

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