Easy Football Cake

I made this football cake a while back. I have also shared it with you then on this very same page. But I recently revisited the page, I felt that I could have written it with a little more narration on how I made and decorated the cake.

So here I am, having rewritten the page and sharing it with you.

This was one of the cakes I made when I first started decorating. It was a round cake, the sides are decorated in green icing (sorry you can’t really see it here. And I don’t have any other pictures of the cake also! It’s terrible, but back then and I did not focus much on capturing cake photos, I was more focused on decorating cakes and getting them to my customers!).

I am hoping to re-do the same football cake or at least recreate parts of the design to show you. And when I do, I will share the pictures here with you.

How to decorate an easy football cake:

Here is what you would need to make and decorate this cake:

• 1 round cake – I used an 8 inch round cake. I baked my chocolate cake into two 8 inch round pans and stacked them together with chocolate buttercream. The cake came to a nice height of 4 inches.
• White Fondant
• Buttercream (for crumb coat and to fill the cake layers)
• Royal icing in white and black (for the ball design) and green (for grass on the sides of the cake.
• Wilton round tip #3

Here is how I decorated and assembled the football cake:

Baking and covering the cake

• I started off with the usual stuff – leveled the cake, filled it with buttercream, and finally covered with a layer of crumb coat.
• Next, I covered the whole cake with fondant. I made sure the edges were nice and sharp with my fondant smoothers. I don’t particularly like to have ganache underneath the fondant and that is simply because ganache does quite set as well in the kind of climate I live in. So I normally settle with a thin crumb coat of buttercream on all my cakes and then use the fondant smoothers to sharp my cake edges.
• Once the base is done, I started with the fun part – the cake deco.

Adding the football decoration

• I drew the football template on a piece of paper. To do it, I first drew a circle in the same size as the cake diameter (you can use your cake tin and draw its outline on a paper). Once I had the diameter, starting from the center, I drew a hexagon, followed by straight lines out, then a whole set of 5 hexagons and then some horizontal lines connecting all those hexagons.
• Does that sound too complicated for a football image? There is another option though – print it off an image online! Is that better? Cool. Let’s move on.
• Once I had the football template, I traced it onto the top of the fondant covered cake. To do this, I used my favorite tool, the sugarcraft knife. I placed the template on the cake, and then using my sugarcraft knife, I cut along the lines on the template. You wouldn’t want to use all your strength when cutting through the lines, the idea is to mark the lines on the fondant and not cut the fondant through, so be easy on the use of your strength here, ok (*wink)?
• Next is the icing. I used black royal icing with Wilton tip #3 and drew outlines of all the hexagons. Then I filled up the center hexagon with black icing in a circular motion. I did not thin the royal icing, I wanted the lines to be visible. I continued with the remaining 5 hexagons.
• Once done, I filled the rest of the empty hexagons with white royal icing, also in a circular motion following the shape of the hexagons.

The cake sides

• Finally, I covered the sides of the cake with green icing in random zig-zag patterns, letting some of the icing extend up to the sides of the football for a natural ‘football in the grass’ effect.

And that’s it. My step by step tutorial for an easy football cake.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial!

Happy decorating!