Touchdown!!!!!

Football season may be over, but it was alive and well in my kitchen last night.

I had the honor this week of making birthday cakes for a set of twins who turned 15 today. These two are my son's age and he's been friends with them for about four and a half years. As far as twins go, these two are so different. If one is involved in an activity, the other one will stay far away ... they crack me up. They even wanted very different cakes for their birthdays. Claire was very sure of what she wanted ... chocolate zebra cake. Grant wasn't as specific. He knew he wanted vanilla and definitely not zebra, but he wasn't sure of the design. He told me he liked music, football, and wrestling. Since I had used fondant on Claire's cake, I really wanted to use frosting on Grant's. So, I decided to make him a football cake. Here's how it turned out ...

I started out with a 9-inch round vanilla cake. To give it the football shape, I cut a 1-inch strip out of the middle and then pushed the two halves together. In hindsight, I probably should have cut out a little more ... I thought the football was a little fat. Anyway, I just stuck the two halves together with some frosting and then put a layer of vanilla buttercream over the entire cake. 

This is where the fun began. 

I scored the cake where I wanted to put all the stripes and the "G" and started piping. Footballs are textured, so I textured this football with a lot of little stars. First I piped in the seems with black and a #3 round tip. I also outlined the "G" with the black. Then I used a #16 star tip and starred in the "G". 

Next up ... white. 

I outlined the stripes first and then starred them in. At first I was only going to put the white  stripes on top, but then as I got going decided to go ahead and go down the sides of the cake as well. 

By this time my right hand and arm were really starting to hurt from squeezing the piping bag ... but I kept going. 

Starring in the brown seemed to take forever. It was nice that I could do it in sections. 

Finally, I used a basket weave tip and put in the laces. I think that there are actually eight cross stitches on a football, but I could only fit six. I was almost done, so now wasn't the time to get that picky.

I really liked how it turned out. I also really like that my hand feels a lot better today after all that piping last night.