Basketball Team Cake
Bubby's has really enjoyed being part of a basketball team this winter. Ever since he was 5 years old, he's said basketball is his favorite sport, but up to now has never had a chance to be part of a team. When the opportunity arose we hesitated a bit because it seemed like an ideal place to catch Covid. But ultimately he has to live his life, and we encouraged him. And he had such a great - and healthy - season!
For the team's end-of-season party we were asked for contributions and I knew immediately a cake was in order. I was very happy no one else volunteered cake, either. I needed to think of a flavor that everybody would like so I went with Snickerdoodle cake. I like this recipe from Preppy Kitchen because it tastes great, doesn't require special ingredients, and makes for a tall cake that is more fun to decorate. I used it for Bubby's graduation cake last year and it was a hit.
Initially, I thought of making a 3D ball-shaped cake and toyed with the idea or ordering a ball pan. I decided against it because I had to transport the cake and because, never having made a cake in a ball pan, I don't know how good it is to eat. I figured a ball pan must yield slices that have a higher cake to buttercream ratio and so not as good of a mouth feel. Of course I could have avoided this by baking and sculpting several layers, but I certainly didn't want to deal with that.
The party was on a Sunday morning so I baked the cake on Friday and it on Saturday.
Note to self the batter for this cake is pretty thick and each pan holds about 500 g of batter. Last year it took 27 minutes in the oven but this time I checked it at 25 minutes and it was still quite raw. I ended up leaving it in the oven for a total of 34 minutes, which was way too much. The cake was definitely a bit on the dry side.
Last year I had a hard time incorporating the cinnamon swirl into the batter and it ended up forming a crust on top. This time I swirled it with the tip of a knife then smoothed it out, and the cinnamon swirl did incorporate into the batter. This avoided the crust on top of each layer, but I wonder if it's the reason why the cake took longer to bake. Not sure why that would be, though, it could just be my oven being inconsistent again.
The decorating took me quite a while on Saturday because I ended up making 3 batches of buttercream. I made this large amount because I feared the star tip would use up a lot of buttercream and because I was tinting it a particular color, I didn't want each batch of buttercream to have a color variation. At the end of the day I could probably have gotten away with 2 batches and I now have a lot of basketball-colored buttercream in the freezer!
To achieve the basketball color I combined orange gel coloring with a bit of brown. I used chocolate buttercream to pipe the basketball's lines. I'd initially tinted a portion of buttercream black, but the black gel color made it looked so greasy and gross that I threw it out. I also didn't want to serve such large amounts of food coloring. As a bonus, the chocolate buttercream enhanced the snickerdoodle taste.
The orange basketball was piped using the only open star tip I have, Wilton size 12. I was happy with the star size and I was able to pipe it in pretty neat rows. For the chocolate lines I used a round tip I have which isn't marked with the size, so unknown size.
The two teams that make up this small league are the Red Cardinals and the Red Hawks (Bubby is a Red Hawk). So, to enhance the decoration I made a red fondant cardinal and hawk. So I tinted white Wilton fondant, using plenty of CMC powder because experience has shown me that Wilton fondant takes a long time to dry. I used up the last of my good fondant for these two decorations, everything else I had, including ready-made red fondant, was old and crumbly and had to be thrown out. To make the birds, I traced cardinal and hawk outlines from the internet, adjusted their size in the copier, cut them out from printer paper and placed them on top of rolled fondant to cut around the outline. The trickiest part with this was inserting a toothpick straight through the bottom of the fondant without the toothpick poking out the back, but I managed to do it.
I also wanted to make basketball player figures and had even traced and cut out some outlines. But since I was now out of fondant, it turned out to be cheaper to purchase these toppers from Amazon.
Ultimately I'm not sure if these decorations - especially the red fondant birds, which people had trouble recognizing - added anything to the cake. But the cake itself was a hit! People were amazed to see it and both adults and young players came up to me to comment it. People said things such as they'd never seen a cake like this before; that they liked it so much they'd taken a picture of it; and I was especially happy when one of the young players came over to thank me and gave me a high five. Not to mention that when Bubby was called to get his certificate and team photo, he was publicly credited with bringing the cake. That moment, to me, was worth all the work I'd put into the cake!
I'd been nervous that there wouldn't be enough cake to feed the entire crowd, which totaled about 35-40 people. I didn't want to turn it into wedding slices. But since it was a tall cake, I managed to slice nice portions that were still thin enough to feed everyone, with plenty of cake leftover to bring home. We enjoyed it for dessert over the next couple of nights.
It was so much fun to make this basketball cake and to see Bubby and his team enjoy it!
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