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Health & Fitness

Behind the Scenes of a Cake Designer: Here's How We Made Our Soccer Ball Cake

Creating a round ball out of cake is not easy. How to you get it to be perfectly round and prevent it from rolling right off the cake board? These are the challenges of a cake designer.

You can create the basic shape in two ways. We've done it both ways. You can either stack four 9" round cake layers with icing in between each layer and then carve a ball shape (this can be a challenge to get a perfect sphere) or you can buy a half round cake pan to do most of the work.

For the latter technique, bake two half-rounds and one regular 9" round layer. The half-round cake pans are actually not full half rounds so you have to add a 9" cake in the middle of the two half-rounds to make a full sphere.

I've attached a diagram of what the layers look like inside the ball cake. Put down a 5" cake board and to this add the half-round cake (narrow side down). Put 1/2" of icing on top of this. Tort the 9" cake layer (which means cutting it vertically in half) and add one of these layers on top of the icing. Add a thin layer of icing to this and then add dowels (I've shown them in blue on the diagram). Continue stack the cake -- the other 9" cake layer, icing and the the 1/2 round cake on top.  Ice the entire cake. We used a cut up plastic soda bottle to help smooth the icing (see the photo of the iced cake).

Then we properly sized the pentagon's and hexagons to fit the ball. It's important to cut these shapes out quickly so the fondant doesn't dry. We place them on the cake individually. If you sized them out carefully, they will fit around the entire cake otherwise there can be problems once you reach the bottom.  We've include a photo of the finished cake.  We've also include other ball cakes we created.  If you have questions on the process, please post them below.  http://sweetgrace.net

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