The Basketball and Grilling Experiment

Ok, so as you know I am a beginner at all of this cake decorating stuff, I mean I can make a mean cheesecake, and I can kind of work with fondant, but butter cream and candy melts are still a new thing for me! So a few weeks ago, I thought I'd make a basketball cake for my dad. I already had a 3-D ball pan that I used for Pilgrims at Thanksgiving so why not?

So I made a yummy Chocolate sponge cake (recipe below) and poured it into both ball pans. It turned out I needed to make a 1 and 1/2 batch of the recipe because it didn't fill the pan enough and it turned out to look like a funny looking egg shape. So, instead of wasting a cake I made two halves, the one above I gave to my dad. I couldn't find the "Terracotta" color to make basketball orange and plain orange is just too bright so added some brown to the orange. I tried following the directions but I just couldn't make it look as pretty as the pros. I did use the Wilton 2010 tip to do the stars instead of the #16 it works pretty well!

This is the other half, I did that one first, and it kind of looks like a spider crawled on top. However, it did taste good! Both cakes were a chocolate sponge with fudge icing inside and butter cream to decorate (all recipes below).

Ok so if that wasn't enough I saw these little grills on Wilton.com and thought I'd make them. Ok first off I could not get the leg placement to make these stand up and second I would use poured fondant next time instead of candy melts, because the candy melts are just a pain!

The candy clay was pretty easy to work with after it dried, before it was super greasy and gross, but it did taste pretty good. Hopefully you can se that these are supposed to be hamburgers with cheese and hot dogs. The coloring is pretty basic except for the hot dogs. I used the red clay and brown clay mixed together to make that color and the grey is just a tiny bit of black.

I wish I would have taken pictures of the mini grills because they turned out so much better. I am grateful to my family for letting me experiment on them.

 Recipes:

I used the frosting recipe from an earlier post: Click Here

Chocoloate Sponge Cake (Remember use 1.5 instead of 1)

ButterCream Icing: Click Here

Candy Clay