In planning for my brother's upcoming 21st party I thought I should probably dig out and post the cake I made him last year for his birthday (yes I know, a tad late). Anyway- I decided to make his favourite football teams jersey; Manchester United. To be honest though, I had no idea what it looked like apart from being red, so I did need to do a little research in order to get the detail right. I used my basic chocolate cake recipe as I knew this would give me both the quantity of cake I required as well. This recipe also ensures that the cake rises evenly so that you are not trying to fiddle with trimming the cake and then icing a crumbly cake (this is one of my pet hates). I baked the cake in a rectangular shallow tin which required less time to bake then if you were to do a normal 20 inch square tin.
Last year I hadn't really delved into the wonderful world of all things fondant related so the icing is made using a basic butter cream recipe and then tinting it with red food colouring. If doing this again though and you feel confident in using fondant it would result in a lot cleaner end product though the butter cream recipe was delicious. In terms of the assembly I downloaded a picture of a football jersey off the internet and printed this on an A3 size piece of paper and transferred the image to baking paper. I placed the template over the cake and cut it to size.
I joined the sleeves of the jersey on using additional butter cream however the joins weren't hidden as much as I would have liked (which you can definitely see in the picture but if you were to use fondant it would hide it. For the labels I cheated (again) and printed them off and laminated them and stuck them on the cake. Of course you could pipe them on with a royal icing but due to his birthday being mid week I had some time constraints to work with. Overall I think it turned out fairly well. If you enjoy vanilla cake just as much as you do chocolate and intend to use butter cream instead of fondant I would recommend using a vanilla base so that you don't have to tint the icing too much in order to cover the rich dark chocolate colour of the cake. This cake just goes to show how a little creativity and not much time can still result in a reasonable attempt at a fun birthday cake.
I joined the sleeves of the jersey on using additional butter cream however the joins weren't hidden as much as I would have liked (which you can definitely see in the picture but if you were to use fondant it would hide it. For the labels I cheated (again) and printed them off and laminated them and stuck them on the cake. Of course you could pipe them on with a royal icing but due to his birthday being mid week I had some time constraints to work with. Overall I think it turned out fairly well. If you enjoy vanilla cake just as much as you do chocolate and intend to use butter cream instead of fondant I would recommend using a vanilla base so that you don't have to tint the icing too much in order to cover the rich dark chocolate colour of the cake. This cake just goes to show how a little creativity and not much time can still result in a reasonable attempt at a fun birthday cake.
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