Soccer Ball Cake / Paul’s 50th

The brief for this cake was to make something related to soccer for a friend of ours by his wife.

They were throwing a party for about 50 people for Paul’s 50th. She didn’t mind what flavor it was but did like the idea of mud cake.

The Soccer Ball

I decided to make this design so I could cater for the 50 people and thought the ‘3D ball’ would add an interesting talking point.

The ball was made from the Wilton 3D Ball Pan which was easy to use by following the included instructions.

My mistake with this though, was making it with a white chocolate mud cake which was quite heavy and made the ball squash out of shape over time!

To cover the soccer ball, I used the template provided with the Wilton tin and cut out the shapes in the 2 colours.

After coating the ball with some buttercream icing, I was able to stick the shapes on in the right pattern. Using a pointy tool from my kit, I pressed in between the pieces to make it look like a seam.

The Green Cake on the Base

The base cake was made with dark chocolate mud cake in a regular slab cake style tin.

The green fondant was the ready to roll green (which came in a 1kg roll like a sausage).

While it saved a lot of time and money from the colouring being done already, it cost me a lot of pain. This was the stickiest, wettest, most difficult fondant I have ever worked with! I would not recommend it.

Aiming to make it less sticky, I added a lot of white fondant to it. I wanted to lighten the colour slightly anyway, but it really didn’t help much.

Rolling and lifting the icing onto the cake was trying and took me close to 10 attempts! (Keep in mind, this was early days of my experience and I didn’t know a whole lot of tricks I know now!)

The letters and numbers were made with d.Line cookie cutters I owned already. I inserted toothpicks into the bottom of the letters before they dried.

I finished off the cake with the same shade green buttercream icing as the fondant and piped a shell border around the base to seal it.

My biggest mistake with this cake was not using dowels and supports in the soccer ball AND underneath it. The weight of it made a dent in the base cake. It really should have been held with a cake board of its own, just like a 2 tiered cake.

Hindsight!

Anyway, Paul absolutely loved his soccer cake and raved about it for years after his 50th!