Eight-year-olds and football. Apparently.
I have now made two different football-themed cakes for two different little boys. The latest one just recently for my nephew's 8th birthday, and the first one several years ago for a friend's son... for his 8th birthday. What a coincidence! So, here are the cakes:
This first one was a football field. Just a rectangular sheet cake, with green icing for the field turf and orange end zones for his favorite team. Football candies from a party store decorated the sides, while little plastic figurines of players and goal posts adorned the field. The team logo in the center was simply a cardboard cut-out.
It was rather quick to put together. My friend and I experimented with food coloring spray for the green. It works well for fast, wide coverage, and gave us a darker green very easily. However, I think you can taste the spray more than a mixed-in dye.
A cookie design inspired this year's cake. I originally thought I might go for the rectangular football field again, until I started browsing Pinterest and saw these football stadium cookies. So I enlarged the design and made it three-dimensional for this football stadium cake.
This was a round chocolate cake, with fluffy white icing between the layers (using this copycat Ding Dong cream recipe). The outer frosting is green buttercream, made by mixing in, not spraying on, the food coloring. Gingerbread football-shaped cookies stand around the side, and mini M&Ms are the crowd in the stands.
How I elevated the stands: I leveled my two round cakes (gave them flat tops) by cutting off their domes before frosting and stacking the layers. Then, I stacked and sculpted a rough slope—like building an old-fashioned stone wall but with frosting and cake scraps. Then I covered it with more frosting and the mini M's. Ta-da!
Baking and decorating cookies (while simple on their own) plus the 3D scene made this cake's assembly more complicated. Len called it the six-hour cake. But anyway, it was fun to make, fun for people to see, and delicious to eat.
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