She wanted something fun, something that reflected her husband’s likes and interests. We tossed around a few ideas and finally decided on a soccer ball cake. He loves soccer so it seemed fitting. I lucked out and was able to find a Wilton soccer ball pan at Homesense for a good price.
The soccer ball pan is basically 2 separate bowl shaped metal pans that you bake the cake in and then put together. I had never baked anything in a dome shaped pan so decided to do a trial run first. Thank god I did! The first one did NOT turn out well. Stupid me, I ran a knife around the outside of each cake once it had cooled in the pan a bit. I do this with all my other cakes so it seemed reasonable. Big mistake. Because the sides of the pan arent straight, I ended up cutting into the cake when I did that and took big chunks of cake off in the process :(.
Not letting it go to waste, I decided to try a couple different piping techniques to see what looked better.
I normally would have tried this with fondant, but she wanted icing since it tastes better (it does). Fondant would have been more of a challenge I think, trying to line up all of the hexagons and pentagons, they would have to be precise.
Overall we thought the ‘lines’ looked better than the stars. I’m not a huge fan of the star tip for this kind of pattern, I think it makes the cakes look a bit cheap, but that’s just me!
I rebaked the cake the next day and it came out perfect. I just made sure the pans were greased and floured thoroughly and they came out easily. Once the cakes were cooled, I levelled them off and cut a bit off of one of the domes to make a flat base for the cake to rest on. I iced the middle of the cake and put the halves together. Once they were set, I put a plastic dowel through the whole cake to keep the top from sliding off. I should have taken pictures of the assembly process, oh well, next time!
The soccer ball pan came with templates for the hexagons and pentagons which i cut out and laminated. I then placed them on the cake and traced around them with royal icing. Once that was done I filled them in with the white and black icing.
I used the same grass technique on the cake board as I did for my garden themed cake earlier. In hindsight, I think it looks a bit plain. I should have added tufts of grass in areas or right under the soccer ball.
What I learned:
- how to make a sphere shaped cake
- how to make a banner out of fondant
What I would do differently:
- try this cake again with fondant to compare
- add more grass – either fondant or icing with the grass tip
Sabina says
This looks amazing!
I tried to make a soccer ball cake once and it was a disaster. I did not make a full ball rather half of one and it took forever to bake.. over an hour. The center was not baked enough and the outer shell of the cake was pretty much burnt.
Couple Questions for you..
Do you have a recipe for this cake? and How did you get your icing to be so BLACK? Is it American butter cream that you used for this?
Olivia says
Hi Sabina! Wow, how did you find this post?? It’s one of my oldest ones so it’s nice to see a comment on it 🙂
The recipe I used for this one was my Almost Scratch Cake (https://livforcake.com/almost-scratch-cake/) with an american buttercream (https://livforcake.com/simple-vanilla-buttercream/). I had to use a LOT of black color gel to get it to that color, but thankfully the black secitons weren’t a huge part of the cake so it was only a small amount of frosting I was coloring. I hope that helps!