Another Birthday, Another Cake

Oh gosh, if only I could just chill out on the birthday cakes. Smunch turns seven this year...and for some reason that's shocking enough. Why I should feel compelled to suddenly experiment with rolled fondant? I just don't know. I mean, yeah, he wanted a Superbowl party and yeah, he wanted his cake to be a couple of helmets (my suggestion). But I'm pretty good with plain ol' buttercream. There was no real reason to go nuts. Heh. Except that I'm just kinda nuts to begin with, perhaps.

So this little project started with me looking up helmet designs on Wikipedia and then printing them out so that the round part was the same size as my cake pan.Then I cut out a few little bits of the cake to match the shape and made an extra cake so I could cut out the part where the face mask is. At least I wasn't crazy enough to make 3D, spherical cakes, right? Smunch asked for one helmet to be strawberry cake and the other to be yellow cake. I didn't have enough strawberry, so the strawberry cake had a yellow cake face mask.Doesn't seem too bad, right? And it wasn't. I stuck everything together with a little buttercream.And then came the tough part...because the Pittsburgh Steelers were playing this year and they've got black helmets. I don't know what was up with the black fondant I made, but it was seriously uncooperative. The fact that the helmet looked like this at the end was a matter of a lot of rolling and re-rolling, unsticking, adding water, adding sugar, cursing...And, I don't know if you've noticed, but the Superbowl tends to have more than one team playing. So, I needed to make a white helmet for the Arizona Cardinals (this was the strawberry cake). Fortunately, my white fondant, made with the exact same recipe, was much easier to deal with. I also made grey fondant for the face mask.I had all that finished before we headed over to Smunch's school for his Cub Scout Pinewood Derby...that's a different post. In the evening I did the hardest part...putting the detailed logos on. It might've been hardest, but it was also the most fun! I did each of them on a piece of fondant, so if I screwed it up, at least I wouldn't ruin the whole cake! Turns out, the cardinal was the easy one.A decision to make the Steelers' logo out of fondant instead of icing made for some more frustration and it didn't turn out perfect, but if you don't go and compare, it looks pretty good!I put the helmets facing each other on a cutting board and covered it with a slightly lopsided lawn of frosting.

Smuch was totally thrilled. He even thanked me out of the blue. I got all kinds of hugs. It may not have been the easiest little project, but it might have been the most appreciated birthday cake to date!