Basketball Cake

I recently made this basketball cake. Yes, it is a basketball cake! It's a Maccabi Tel-Aviv basketball cake. This is a very well know team here in Israel, and Europe. And, I happen to make cakes for some of the players on the team. In fact, this one was made for the team's captain, Shawn James, son who celebrated his 3rd birthday recently.

The cake inside is a vanilla butter-based cake with vanilla buttercream and homemade sugar paste.

Then, I made this one for another one of the team players, Soforklis, son. And, this one also has a basketball court.

And, this one I made for a Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball fan.

Now, for those of you interested, here's just a little write up for you on how I made this basketball cake.

First, I baked two ball pan cakes (Wilton Sports Ball Pan Set). And, choose a dense cake like my vanilla pound or dense chocolate cake. You can use buttercream or ganache. For example, in this cake, I had a request for vanilla buttercream. And, you need to cut out a cake circle the same diameter as the cake. So you can sandwich the two domes to form a ball like so.

Here, you can see I have not cut my bottom dome into two with buttercream. In fact, I have only cut out a tiny thin slice of my bottom dome to ensure the ball sits firm on the board.

Since, my cake had to travel and I did not want to cut out too much of the bottom making it a ¾ ball. Also, I wanted to make it more like the whole ball.

Then, I put buttercream on one half. Next, I added three dowels into the cake. Ensure they are all the way in to the cake not protruding outside.

Once the dowels were in, I place the cake circle and the next second dome. Then, I did sandwich the second dome with buttercream.

Next crumb coat and second coat the cake with buttercream. And, to smooth the final coat, I use a thin piece of bendable plastic. Like one of those bendable credit cards or miles cards. Choose one that bends so you can hold it bent and just smooth the ball. It does work wonderfully. You can also use a soft piece of acetate.

In addition, I also put a center dowel in the cake to ensure my ball doesn't roll off the board.

Ideally if you were making a basketball it's fairly easy. Just cover the whole cake with your brown/coppertone fondant. Like you would any sphere cake.

And, to get a basketball color, add a few drops of orange to your brown fondant until you get the desired look. At first it sounds weird because brown is a dark versus orange a light color but they do blend and you can see the effect.

For the panels on this one I honestly did not know how to do it. So, I looked at a regular basketball and with a toothpick marked the pattern. Then, I used a picture from the real ball (below) to see which colors correspond.

For the panels I just rolled two large sheets of blue and yellow. Then, I cut out rectangles and using an exact-o knife cut our the excess following the toothpick marks I had made before.

Next, I used my extruder for the white and sealed all the panel edges. The logo is edible print. I Just attached it with a drop of water. However, do not add too much water to any edible image as the colors will bleed.

For the board, I choose a wood effect because basketball is an indoor game played on a wooden floor.

So, I just rolled out white fondant. And, gave it the look of wooden panels. Then, I made some cuts and dents to give the wood look. In this case, the wooden floor does not look old but rather has a nice clean finish. So, I did not make many cuts or marks.

Next, I painted the whole thing with brown, used some black and ivory to create shades and highlights. I wish I had a better picture of the board but it was done with the ball on the board so this is the best I have.

And, here is the back of the cake.

Well, that's all there is to my Basket Ball cake. I do hope I am able to make one of these soon again. If I do I will try and make a video so you can see me do it. I do hope you will find the write up useful.