Gloverly Cupcakes

This week has been a busy cake week. I usually find that if somebody asks me to make a cake, it usually ends up being for a week when I’m already making one. This week I’ve made two very different cakes, but both had a football theme. The first one I made was this one – I’ve never made a football shirt before and it was a learning experience. The main lesson I learnt was that it’s pretty hard to move a cake covered in fondant, when the cake underneath is not all in one piece. In order to help the cake bake quicker and avoid wasting too much, I baked it in my 12”  adjustable Alan Silverwood tin and used the 2 internal dividers to separate it into 3 cakes – all 12” long, but one 5” wide, one 4” wide and the last one ended up being 3” wide.  I used the 4” and 5” cakes to make the main body of the shirt and then cut the 3” one to create two sleeves. I baked 2 cakes like this – each one was made using 1.5 batches of the vanilla sponge recipe from here, and baked for 25-30 minutes at 170 C I levelled off all the cakes and covered one layer with vanilla buttercream (I needed one batch of this recipe for the whole cake) and topped with strawberry jam. I then topped it with the next layer of the shirt and covered the whole lot in buttercream (not too thick, just to create an even surface to cover) and left it to harden for about 30minutes. I then covered the whole thing with white icing. It was as I was covering it that I realised my error. I should have put the cake on a thin board the same shape as it so that it was easy to lift onto the main cake board. Luckily it was on a sheet of greaseproof paper and I managed to lift it as one cake onto the board using the greaseproof and then very carefully using my cake lifter I slide the greaseproof out from underneath. I then added the red stripes, and details. It also helps if the cake board is covered the day before – the icing on it had hardened enough that I didn’t damage it when I put the cake onto it. The badge was made out of sugar florist paste which I rolled so it was fairly thin and left it to dry slightly. I used food colouring pens and food colouring and a paintbrush to paint the detail onto it. Finally I used scissors to cut it out – try to do this before it dries out too much otherwise it will crack.