Basketball Cake Tutorial

Wow... 2 months. Has it really been that long since my last post?! Ay Caramba! Lots going on lately.

Check out my other blog for details --->

I actually have a ton of stuff to catch up on so I am going to just do really short posts. 

Let me know if you have any questions and I'll answer those and add them back into the posts.

These cakes turned out so cute! They were for my little brother's basketball championship game for his team. It was super simple. 

I made 8 inch round cakes and stacked them 2 high with frosting in between. I cut the cakes so they rounded off as much as I could on both the top and bottom (to try to make them look as round as possible without falling apart). This would also be really cute if you used a dome cake pan to truly make it round. I colored some buttercream orange (using water-based food gel) and covered the whole cake. Looking back I wish I had done the orange a little bit darker but I think I actually ran out of orange color and that's why. :)

Once you do that, take plain twizzler black licorice for the stripes and lay one across the middle of the cake. You will have to use more than 1 rope for each line. Try to connect them away from the bends because they tried to stick up on me and wouldn't stay bent how I wanted them to. 

Lay a rope perpendicular to the one you just laid (see pictures) and you can just start them right on each side of the first one (make sense?). 

 

Then take about 3 orange m&ms- you can get plain orange m&ms at certain party stores. I went to Zurchers- and lay them down (with the m&m brand facing down) starting at the corner of the licorice on each side (again see picture). Do about 2 rows. You want them to be as close as possible. It looks better. Laying the 3 m&ms down helps you measure where your outer licorice lines should go. Now lay down your last outside licorice lines. To get a bit of a rounder effect, curve the licorice at the bottom back towards your main middle line just a little bit (see picture- right licorice is curved in a little).

Voila! And there you have it. These are not difficult to make but do take a little bit of time and dexterity since you have to place each m&m.

I want to say I used about 12-16 oz of m&ms by weight to cover these 2 cakes and 1 package of black licorice (I think! I forgot to write it down so if it just doesn't seem right when you are buying the m&ms, go with your gut. Extra m&ms never hurt anyone. That was my philosophy). I bought way too many m&ms so now  extras are sitting in a dish on my desk waiting for on-lookers to come and eat them. They are sitting right next to the new Sherbert Oreos I had to get for my work people because they looked weird... yeah, they're pretty sweet (as in sugary... not awesome). Not my favorite. Other people liked them though..... tangent.

If you really want to know how many I used... you could count the m&ms on the cake. =D

Anyway, they were a big hit! So fun. Try them out for your next sports party!