Sports Themed Groom's Cake

This Sports Themed Groom's Cake is every sport-loving man's dream cake! Teams edited (of course) to match the groom's favorite teams!! 🙂  It's six tiers of chocolate cake with chocolate ganache and chocolate buttercream... what more could you ask for?

Many of you emailed back and asked questions about this cake when I sent it out in my weekly newsletter. So I thought I'd go ahead and post the cake with as many details as possible to help you.

Let's get to it:

Six Tiered Sports Themed Grooms Cake Details:

First up - this six-tier cake has a dummy tier on the bottom, then the top five tiers are real cake. The reason for the dummy cake was quite simple - my client didn't need that much cake. The top five tiers, (4", 6", 8", 10" and 12" squares) totaled 180 servings.

• I baked the cakes in these Fat Daddio square cake pans. If you've been reading Rose Bakes for very long, you know I much prefer Magic Line pans. But I bought this square set when I baked my very first wedding cake before my business was really a business and I didn't know anything about different brands of cake pans. And because I'm cheap and don't bake square cakes that often, I've just stuck with them. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this brand - I just like the Magic Line ones best.
• For the bottom tier, I ordered a 14" square foam dummy (5" tall), then painted it with sugar glue and applied the fondant panels. I don't have tutorials for this, but I can share where I got my information...

How to Get Sharp Edges on Square Cake with Fondant

If you're going to do paneling on a square cake, cut out the panels and freeze them for about 10 minutes before applying to the cake. It makes putting them on so much easier!!

• I learned how to panel cakes in the Make-Ahead Cakes class on Craftsy (except I used fondant - not modeling chocolate) and I'm pretty sure I also learned more about paneling in the Clean & Simple Birthday Cakes class (although it's been ages since I watched it, so I could be wrong). The bottom line is - the sharp corners on this cake were accomplished by fondant paneling techniques I learned in Craftsy.
• The cakes were chocolate cake filled with chocolate buttercream, then covered in chocolate ganache.
• All cakes were covered in different colors of Satin Ice Fondant : red, blue, white, green, black and burgundy.

Hand-cut Logos on Cake:

Other than questions about the sharp corners, several of you also asked about the logos. They really weren't that hard to do.

Since most of my cake tiers usually work out to 4.5-5 inches tall, I found logos online for each team and resized them to an approximate 4" height. Then I printed them on regular paper and cut them out with scissors.

It's kind of hard to explain, but next I rolled out the color of fondant that was on the outside of each logo to be the "back" piece.

For example, for the top New York logo, the back was white. So I rolled out white fondant, laid the cutout logo on top of the fondant, and cut out the "back" with a scalpel. Then I took the paper off, and cut away the white outside edge. The blue was the next biggest color, so I rolled out blue fondant and cut out the blue shape.

I brushed some shortening over the white, laid the blue on top, then cut away the blue from the paper and individually cut out the white letters, white stripes and red triangles. I laid those individually on red and white fondant (respectively) and cut those out of fondant. Then laid those on the blue.

Each layer of fondant was as thin as I could get it without it tearing and I used shortening to attached fondant to fondant.

Does that make sense? It was tedious. It was time-consuming. But it was worth it!

The time decorating was worth it!

For some of the smaller details/letters on the cake, I actually just put the cut out (paper) letters directly on the fondant logos. (😲 - yes I did).

I'd already told the client that the logos wouldn't be edible because I'd be leaving them out overnight to dry/harden, so I didn't have to worry about the ink, etc. It was so much neater to put the paper details vs. the cut-out fondant for the really tiny stuff so I rolled with it and my clients were overhwhelmingly happy with the results. I only used paper on the very front/top layers of the logos so it was never in contact with any of the fondant that might be eaten.

I also used edible paint and food markers for some of the details on the different logos... it was a combination of many techniques but I hope I've given you enough basics to get you started!

In the end, this Sports Themed Grooms Cake all turned out so much better than I hoped! I stacked the cakes on an 18" black square cake drum and wrapped the edges with black ribbon. I wanted it to sort of disappear against the wood stand that the groom was using - it had great sentimental value.

In a perfect world, I would've assembled the cake directly on the stand but ya'll know I've had some issues with assembling cakes in front of a crowd (that was also a 6 tiered cake... or it was supposed to be) so I avoid it like the plague. 😜

I didn't measure the finished height or weight of the cake, but one of my kids snapped this picture of me just after I put the top tier on:

Yep. I was on a step stool. The cake was so big and tall that I used a turntable expander so I didn't have to worry about the drum bending or tipping off the stand. I also have the sketch below that I sent the mother-of-the-groom ahead of time. The only change was that we switched the background colors of the top two tiers to better compliment the logos.

Alrighty - that's all I have for you on this cake! Please don't hesitate to ask questions if I've forgotten anything! Also, check out my other sports themed cakes here!!

Happy Caking!

Rose

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