Fancy making a football cake for birthday? Here is an easy football cake design you can try. This is a simple round cake with edible football decoration on top of the cake. This football cake is covered in fondant and decorated with royal icing in black, white and green.

A round cake with the top decorated in a black and white football

This was one of the cakes I made when I first started decorating. It is a round cake, and 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!).

This is a fairly easy cake to decorate. You can make this football cake without any mold and there is also no carving required. All you need is a round cake tin and a football template for the cake top.

To make this football cake design, you bake the cake in a round tin, and crumb coat it with buttercream. And then you cover the cake with white fondant. For the cake top, you will need a football template. You can draw this on your own or search for an image on the internet. You can place the template on the cake top and trace the lines with a sugar craft knife.

Start by decorating the top of the cake. Use black icing to draw the lines and the fill the hexagons with black and white icing.

And then complete the cake by piping green zigzag piping in green royal icing.

Easy right? Get the full recipe and detailed decorating tutorial below.

How to Make a 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 height of 4 inches after stacking.
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 number 3
Sugar craft knife
Football template
Piping bags

Baking the cake

I started off with the usual stuff – I baked the cakes and let them cool completely before starting with the stacking and decorating.
Once the cakes have cooled down completely, I leveled the cakes and filled the layers with buttercream. I then covered the entire cake with a thin coat of buttercream as the crumb coat.
Next, I covered the whole cake with white 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 for a thin crumb coat of buttercream on all my cakes and then use the fondant smoothers to sharpen my cake edges.

Preparing the football template

I drew the football template on a piece of paper. To do it, I used my cake tin and traced 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. To make it easier to draw the football pattern, draw out the hexagon shape on a piece of paper and cut it out along its outline.
Use that hexagon to trace the first hexagon shape right in the centre. This will be the black hexagon in the center. And then use the same hexagon template to guide you in drawing out the remaining 5 semi hexagons towards the edges of the circle. And finally, join the pointed corners of each hexagon with one another. Once you have the template all drawn out, cut it out.
If drawing the image is too complicated for you, you can always print an image off the internet. Simply resize it to ensure it fits perfectly onto the top of your cake.

Tracing the football design onto the cake

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.

Piping the edible football cake decoration

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 design, perfect for birthday.

Like this football cake design? Here are my other posts you might want to check out:

Recipe (Printable)

Here is the full printable version of the football cake recipe and decorating tutorial.

📖Recipe

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial!

Happy decorating!

Easy Football Cake Design - A Simple Decorating Tutorial

How to Make a Football Cake