Friday, November 8, 2013

Fast and Easy Football Cake

It's that time of year again!
Not only is it football season, but October is birthday season in my family.( we have 5 )
Today is my father's, and he is a diehard New York Giants fan.
We live 5 hours from Giant's stadium and he still has season tickets and drives to every single home game , no matter what the weather is.
I don't love any sport or hobby THAT much.
So, for his birthday I figured I should do something football/ Giants.
In an earlier post I made a NY Giants helmet for a co-worker so I had to come up with something different.
A football, basic and fun.
For cake flavor I decided on pumpkin cake with cream cheese buttercream frosting seeing as he loves those pumpkin rolls. I figured this would be the same flavor in a different form.

I used the recipe from Epicurious for a Spiced Pumpkin Layer Cake.
I left out some of the ginger just because we aren't huge fans of it but made it as the recipe is written.






I baked 2 cakes in my Wilton football pan.



If you want to make a tall / whole football I recommend filling the pans 3/4 full with this recipe. It doesn't rise like other cakes.
I  also only had to bake for 40 minutes in this pan at 350F

Once cooled I leveled my football and filled it with icing.
I had to carve my cake a bit due to the short layers. If they had baked hight enough I would not have had to do this. ( better luck next time ;)

Once filled and carved I iced the cake with more cream cheese icing and let it crust up a bit.


I rolled out some brown fondant and using a small impression mat , imprinted the football texture. You can use anything bumpy for this, before I had a texture mat I used a meat tenderizer mallet to make similar impressions.




Once the cake was covered I added my detail lines.
Draw 1 down the center of the top




Then one on each side of the football.



Last step of the football is the lacing.
I poked holes in approximately one inch increments down the top on each side of the line.


and piped the laces with white buttercream in the order shown in the photo's below.



In hindsight , I would have used a larger round tip for this step to make a thicker lacing.

For the cake board I lined it like a football field with white fondant.
Then I piped in grass with a wilton tip.


I saw this technique on Youtube and thought it would be nice.
Time consuming, but I do like the finished product on the cake board.
You can skip the middle where the football will sit. ( and you will probably want to after piping all that grass)

Set the football on the cake board, in the grass.


( see how lame my lacing is ?)

To bring in the Giants element ( or any team ) I decided to make a disc.
Basic , blue fondant/gumpaste mix, cut with a 3 inch round cutter with the logo.

Once that was dry I leaned it against the cake and that was it.

This cake only took 1 hour to decorate which in cake decorating time is quite fast.
If you are looking for a quick impressive cake for the football fan in your life, this is it!






No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.