Cool Homemade Soccer Birthday Cake Design

I was looking to do something different for the boy’s 17th birthday cake but he insisted on a Homemade Soccer Birthday Cake Design….again. What should I have expected as he lives and breathes the game? We were having family over and they have varying preferences so I baked a yellow sheet cake for the base. I then used a small Pyrex bowl and a square cake pan for a chocolate cake mix. I put a thin layer of decorator frosting on the sheet cake and then frosted it with green buttercream to simulate grass.

I set the bowl shaped chocolate cake in one corner and covered it with white decorator frosting for the soccer ball. I cut the square cake into three rectangles and then cut one rectangle in half.I frosted the bottom of each smaller piece and set them on top of the ends of the two rectangles and put them in the freezer to chill for several hours.

I made a homemade marshmallow fondant from a recipe I found on line. I used paste food coloring to try to match the colors of the boy’s soccer shoes. Alas, my ‘red’ never got deeper than a horrendous pink but I tarried on with the project. Getting the chocolate cakes from the freezer, I cut and shaped them into a shoe shape and then covered with with a thin layer of decorator frosting. Having never worked with fondant before, I wasn’t sure how it would settle onto the cake shapes but was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked out. I even added fondant cleats to the bottom of one ‘shoe’ by dabbing a little water onto the fondant sole and holding them there for a few seconds.

To finish, I used glitter decorator gel to add lines for the soccer ball and added the boy’s name to the side of the shoe. In retrospect, I wish I had used white for the laces so they would have stood out more but I was trying to recreate the soccer shoes that stink up my car on game and tournament weekends.

This was the first time I have ever tried shaping a cake and using fondant like this so I was pleased with the result. More importantly, the boy was too.