Last night we attended a birthday dinner for my husband’s cousin, celebrating his 16th birthday. Last year for his 15th birthday, I made a skateboard cake. This year, I thought a car cake would be a tease, since you can’t get your license in New York until you are 17. Since he loves playing soccer, I opted for a soccer ball cake, using my favorite piece of baking equipment: my Betty Crocker Bake ‘n Fill Pan!
I used the Perfect Pound Cake recipe, and filled the cavity with pudding custard (made with lemon-flavored pudding). I covered the cake with traditional buttercream frosting, and then placed marshmallow fondant pieces on top, making a soccer ball pattern.
I cut the fondant pieces using a template that I found online. I had trouble printing the template as the actual size, so I opened the jpg in Microsoft Word and scaled it to the size that I thought would be appropriate for my cake. I would say the black pieces are about 2.5 inches across at the widest point, and the white pieces about 3 inches across. As the ball curved at the bottom, I hat to cut the fondant pieces a little smaller.
After all the pieces were placed on the ball, I took a toothpick and pricked holes all around each fondant piece to make it look like the stitching. I used different toothpicks for the black and white pieces so that I didn’t get any black fondant on the white pieces. Which brings me to another warning: when working with both black and white fondant, roll out your white fondant FIRST so that it does not get contaminated with pieces of black fondant.
As a finishing touch, I piped green buttercream frosting at the bottom using the Wilton #233 grass tip, and placed a 16 on the top of the ball using a Wilton #5 round tip.
