Soccer Ball Fondant

It was the birthday of my boyfriend's brother a couple of weeks ago and I made his birthday cake. It took me about a week to plan the cake and about 2 days to execute the plan - yes, yes, sometimes I'm overly ambitious haha.


No, but really, one of the things I love about baking is how baked goods, especially cakes, sort of bring people together, make people happy, and make occasions a bit more special. So you see, in a way, baking for others is a responsibility - you don't mess with birthday cakes. But this responsibility I always happily welcome and fulfill to my utmost capability.:)

Anyway, here's the final cake. My boyfriend's brother plays soccer and is a soccer fan so we thought it would be fitting to make him a soccer themed cake. He's an FC Barcelona fan so I followed the team's color.

This is only my third time to work with fondant, my first outside school. The covering of the cake needs a lot of improvement, but overall I'm happy with this cake.

The crowning glory of this cake is the soccer boy. I wish I could tell you how to make this but it was my sister Kariza's masterpiece. If you know me, you'd know I'm not a very creative person. I've only started exploring my sense of creativity when I entered pastry school. I've made leaps of improvements in that department but to make a soccer player out of fondant is still way too advanced for me! All I can say is that the folks in Ace of Cakes make their jobs look easy!

I can tell you however how to make good-looking soccer ball fondants. It's mostly lines, math, and logic - my kind of creativity.;)

First you need a styrofoam ball. You can actually also make a cake ball or a fondant ball. Then, measure the ball's circumference and use the following formula to get one side of the pentagon and hexagon:

One side = (circumference X 2) / 30

Now, the pentagons (black) have 108degree angles between the sides. While the hexagons (white) have 120. Make a stencil of the polygons on some hard paper and use it as a guide to cut the rolled fondant.

(If you're using it for real cake/the fondant's intended to be eaten, wrap the stencils in clean wax paper before using on the fondant.)

Once you have your fondant polygons, you can start sticking them onto the styrofoam ball with some water the way a soccer ball looks like. You don't have to mark the stryofoam or the cake or the fondant ball like me. The polygons are measured so there shouldn't be a problem. Obviously, the larger the soccer balls, the easier they are to make.

This is probably the most challenging cake I've made so far but it was really fun. The only downside of this project is that my youngest sister is now expecting a HOGWARTS cake on her birthday.:)))