Soccer Ball Birthday Cake

A friends son’s 11th birthday was coming and I hadn’t made a novelty cake in ages so I asked if I could make one for his birthday. He is football mad, or soccer as they say in New Zealand, and the request was a football cake. I didn’t think it would be too hard to make as I could use two pudding bowls and just shape them a little to get the perfect ball. This bit was very easy, it was when I realised that it was going to take a bit of mathematics to figure out the size and amount of the hexagons & pentagons required to cover it to make it looks realistic. Lucky P is rather good at these things and he came to my rescue, we also find a good site on how a football was structured (see link). If you make the cake, I recommend you use this site and perhaps even print out the diagram and use the shapes as stencils for the fondant icing.

Ingredients – Lemon Sour Cream Cake

 250g butter
2 1/2 cups of SR four
2 cups brown sugar
5 large eggs
250g sour cream
zest of 3 lemons (keep lemons for butter cream filling)
800g fondant icing (if buying in NZ I find Pettinice the best to use). Colour 70% white, 10% black and then small amounts, yellow, blue and red for scarf.
200g butter & 200g icing sugar (for butter cream)

Method

Prepare 2 x one litre pudding bowls buy greasing and flouring them.
Preheat oven to 180 degrees centigrade.
Cream butter & sugar together till light and fluffy.
Add eggs one at a time and beat mixture in between each one.
Beat in the sour cream & lemon zest.
Add flour and fold into the mixture.
Put into prepared pudding bowls.
Bake for 45 minutes or until an inserted knife comes out clean. Check before removing the cake from the oven.
Allow to cool over night before shaping cake. 
For the butter cream, beat together the 200g of butter and 200g of icing sugar together, then add the juice of one or two lemons depending on how strong you want the lemon flavour.   

Assembly of cake

Depending on how much your cakes rise you make have to trim the tops off the pudding cakes (flat side) to make the cake look more round than oval when put one on top of each other.
Shape one cake to make it round (this will sit on the top. The other can stay flat since you want it to sit on a cake board. 
Put one cake on top of the other (see pics) and check the shape, if it looks more oval than round then slice a piece off the cake from the flat side.
Once you have the right shape, spread 1/3 of the butter cream onto the flat side of one cake and then place the other on top (see pics).
Cover the whole of the cake with the rest of the butter cream, this is to stick the fondant icing to.
Roll out the white fondant and cut out the hexagon shapes from it (see link for football structure).
Roll out black fondant and cut out the pentagon shapes from it. If you aren’t fortunate enough to live in a country where black fondant come ready coloured this is what I suggest as it is how I made mine. I have found it impossible to colour fondant black with ‘regular’ food colouring so I cut out my shapes and painted them with black food colouring instead and wait for them to partially dry before using them. 
Begin with placing a black pentagon, using a pallet knife, on top and then the white hexagons round it. 
Continue with the pattern as shown on ball until cake is covered. Do not worry if the shapes to do not fit at the bottom since it will be covered by a scarf, just trim them to fit and cover the butter cream.
If the shapes don’t meet together exactly you can smooth and stretch them slightly with a pallet knife so they meet. 
Before you make a scarf, roll a sausage shape of fondant to fit around the base of the ball. This is to stop it rolling and will be covered by the scarf. 
Press the sausage shape of fondant around the base of the ball to secure it.
Make a scarf in desired colours and wrap around base.